Climate change and intensive land use reduce soil animal biomass via dissimilar pathways.

Rui Yin,Nico Eisenhauer,Julia Siebert,Martin Schädler

doi:10.7554/elife.54749

Abstract

Global change drivers, such as climate change and land use, may profoundly influence body size, density, and biomass of soil organisms. However, it is still unclear how these concurrent drivers interact in affecting ecological communities. Here, we present the results of an experimental field study assessing the interactive effects of climate change and land-use intensification on body size, density, and biomass of soil microarthropods. We found that the projected climate change and intensive land use decreased their total biomass. Strikingly, this reduction was realized via two dissimilar pathways: climate change reduced mean body size and intensive land use decreased density. These findings highlight that two of the most pervasive global change drivers operate via different pathways when decreasing soil animal biomass. These shifts in soil communities may threaten essential ecosystem functions like organic matter turnover and nutrient cycling in future ecosystems.

Highlights

Anthropogenic environmental changes are altering ecological communities and ecosystem functions (Chapin et al, 2000; Sala et al, 2000)
Intensive land use reduces the density of soil microarthropods
We hypothesized the detrimental effects of climate change on soil microarthropods could be strong in intensive land use, whereas they could be compensated by extensive land use. In contrast to this hypothesis, we did not observe any significant interaction effects of climate and land use on body size, density, and total biomass of soil microarthopods. These results showed that the effects of climate change on soil microarthropods were consistent across different land-use regimes, suggesting that detrimental climate change effects will not be exacerbated by intensive land use, nor mitigated by extensive land use

Summary

Introduction

Anthropogenic environmental changes are altering ecological communities and ecosystem functions (Chapin et al, 2000; Sala et al, 2000). As warmer conditions increase individual metabolism (Scheffers et al, 2016) and development rates (Atkinson et al, 2003), many groups of organisms like plants, fish, ectotherms, birds, and mammals have already been reported to shrink their body size in response to warming (Sheridan and Bickford, 2011). These shifts in body size may result in a wide range of implications, e.g. biomass loss, including negative effects on the structure and dynamics of ecological networks (Woodward et al, 2005). It is well known that the high biodiversity in soil drives a plethora of essential ecosystem functions (Bardgett and Van Der Putten, 2014; Hättenschwiler et al, 2005; Wall et al, 2015), it is still not clear how the body size, density, and biomass of soil organisms vary in response to climate change

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Conclusion