Warming shifts the biomass distribution of soil microarthropod communities

Abstract

Climate warming is often more detrimental to large body sized organisms than small body sized organisms. Yet, how such differential effects of warming at organismal levels affect aggregate community properties, such as community biomass, remains little understood. Here, using geothermally warmed sub-Arctic grassland soils, we investigate how total biomass (product of density and individual body mass) of two major groups of soil microarthropods (Collembola and mites), which are composed of both large and small body sized species, shift in warmed soils when warmed by ∼3–∼6 °C. Our results show that total biomass of Collembola significantly decreased in warmed soils predominantly due to a decline in the density of large body sized species. In contrast, total mite biomass showed a unimodal response to warming. As a result, there was a shift towards mite biomass dominated microarthropod communities in warmed soils. Within Collembola, the deep soil living eu-edaphic functional group declined the most in total biomass, whereas the unimodal response in mites was most pronounced in oribatid mites. Our study highlights that warming induced shifts in total community biomass of soil microarthropods are likely due to greater detrimental effects of warming on several large body sized Collembola.