Global decomposition experiment shows soil animal impacts on decomposition are climate-dependent

By D. Wall, M. Bradford, Mark G. St. John, J. A. Trofymow, V. Behan-Pelletier, D. Bignell, J. Dangerfield, W. Parton, J. Rusek, Winfried Voigt and 26 more. Global Change Biology, 2008

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate and litter quality are primary drivers of terrestrial decomposition and, based on evidence from multisite experiments at regional and global scales, are universally factored into global decomposition models. In contrast, soil animals are considered key regulators of decomposition at local scales but their role at larger scales is unresolved. Soil animals are consequently excluded from global models of organic mineralization processes. Incomplete assessment of the roles of soil animals stems from the difficulties of manipulating invertebrate animals experimentally across large geographic gradients. This is compounded by deficient or inconsistent taxonomy. We report a global decomposition experiment to assess the importance of soil animals in C mineralization, in which a common grass litter substrate was exposed to natural decomposition in either control or reduced animal treatments across 30 sites distributed from 43°S to 68°N on six continents. Animals in the mesofaunal size range were recovered from the litter by Tullgren extraction and identified to common specifications, mostly at the ordinal level. The design of the trials enabled faunal contribution to be evaluated against abiotic parameters between sites. Soil animals increase decomposition rates in temperate and wet tropical climates, but have neutral effects where temperature or moisture constrain biological activity. Our findings highlight that faunal influences on decomposition are dependent on prevailing climatic conditions. We conclude that (1) inclusion of soil animals will improve the predictive capabilities of region‐ or biome‐scale decomposition models, (2) soil animal influences on decomposition are important at the regional scale when attempting to predict global change scenarios, and (3) the statistical relationship between decomposition rates and climate, at the global scale, is robust against changes in soil faunal abundance and diversity.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/385beb821ddc1c2d2054a675004a76a7f2617424

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Citations in the corpus

Advances in global change research require open science by individual researchers (2012, background): “In ecology, shared data has underlied recent advances in understanding global ecosystem services, such as decomposition (Wall et al., 2008) and pollination networks (Rezende et al., 2007).”
Connecting the green and brown worlds . allometric and stoichiometric predictability of above- and below-ground networks (2013, methodology): “In a global decompo- sition experiment, Wall et al. (2008) used two thousand glass-fibre bags filled with sterilised and air-driedAgropyron litter to show that arthropods in this size range enhanced decomposition rates in certain areas, relative to site-specific climate and carbon content of native…”
Soil biodiversity and carbon cycling: a review and synthesis of studies examining diversity–function relationships (2011, background): “…(Anderson et al., 1983; Seastedt, 1984; Ingham et al., 1985; Bardgett et al., 1993; Setälä et al., 1996; Cortez & Bouche, 1998; Cole et al., 2000; Hedlund & Öhrn, 2000; Hättenschwiler & Bretscher, 2001; Mikola et al., 2002; Wall et al., 2008; Powers et al., 2009; Yang & Chen, 2009).”
Soil biota accelerate decomposition in high‐elevation forests by specializing in the breakdown of litter produced by the plant species above them (2009, background): “at home) than beneath different plant species (away) (Bocock et al. 1960; Hunt et al. 1988; Gholz et al. 2000; Negrete-Yankelevich et al. 2008; Vivanco & Austin 2008 ), which has been referred to as ‘home-field advantage’ (HFA) (Gholz et al. 2000).”
Searching for unifying principles in soil ecology (2009, methodology): “Consider studies such as LIDET (Gholz et al., 2000), GLIDE (Wall et al., 2008), and the extensive European soil translocation transects (Bottner et al., 2000) which have greatly improved our understanding of the biotic and abiotic controls on soil processes simply because they used standardized prot”
Soil fauna and soil functions: a jigsaw puzzle (2014, methodology): “REVIEW ARTICLE published: 22 April 2014 doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2014.00007 Soil fauna and soil functions: a jigsaw puzzle”
Linking litter decomposition of above‐ and below‐ground organs to plant–soil feedbacks worldwide (2013, background): “2005) and indirect effects (litter quality, decomposer community composition and activity; Cornwell et al. 2008; Wall et al. 2008; Freschet, Aerts & Cornelissen 2012a).”
Contrasting mass‐ratio vs. niche complementarity effects on litter C and N loss during decomposition along a regional climatic gradient (2017, background): “Decomposer organisms (microbes and detritivores) play a somewhat less important, though, significant role (Wall et al. 2008; Garc ıa-Palacios et al. 2013), especially during the early decomposition stages (Cotrufo et al.”