Soil acidity, ecological stoichiometry and allometric scaling in grassland food webs

By Christian Mulder, James J. Elser. Global Change Biology, 2009

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The factors regulating the structure of food webs are a central focus of community and ecosystem ecology, as trophic interactions among species have important impacts on nutrient storage and cycling in many ecosystems. For soil invertebrates in grassland ecosystems in the Netherlands, the site‐specific slopes of the faunal biomass to organism body mass relationships reflected basic biochemical and biogeochemical processes associated with soil acidity and soil C : N : P stoichiometry. That is, the higher the phosphorus availability in the soil, the higher, on average, the slope of the faunal biomass size spectrum (i.e., the higher the biomass of large‐bodied invertebrates relative to the biomass of small invertebrates). While other factors may also be involved, these results are consistent with the growth rate hypothesis from biological stoichiometry that relates phosphorus demands to ribosomal RNA and protein production. Thus our data represent the first time that ecosystem phosphorus availability has been associated with allometry in soil food webs (supporting information available online). Our results have broad implications, as soil invertebrates of different size have different effects on soil processes.

Subfields: Ecology, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0f8655abac8050690bb943b038cf6b33ae3758a

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Citations in the corpus

Ecological Networks in a Changing Climate (2010, unknown): “…but increasing number of food webs that have been described in this way (e.g. Jonsson et al., 2005; Layer et al., 2010b; McLaughlin et al., 2010; Mulder and Elser, 2009; O’Gorman and Emmerson, 2010; Petchey et al., 2002; Woodward et al., 2005a), but more data are still needed before we can make…”
The elemental stoichiometry of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and its relationships with organismic lifestyle and ecosystem structure and function: a review and perspectives (2011, unknown): “Mulder and Elser (2009) recently analysed the mass-abundance and body-size spectra of all soil invertebrates, fungi and bacteria in 22 grassland soils in the Netherlands.”
Warming alters the size spectrum and shifts the distribution of biomass in freshwater ecosystems (2011, unknown): “1 44 20 7882 3640, e-mail: g.yvon-durocher@qmul.ac.uk; Dr. G. Woodward, e-mail: g.woodward@qmul.ac.uk r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1681 fisheries (Rice & Gislason, 1995) and, more recently, agricultural practices in terrestrial ecosystems (Mulder & Elser, 2009).”
Traits explain community disassembly and trophic contraction following experimental environmental change (2012, unknown): “For example, Mulder & Elser (2009) found that steeper size spectra slopes were associated with changes in nutrient status of grassland soils, in particular decreases in carbon and nitrogen availability.”
Form and function: Metabolic footprints of nematodes in the soil food web (2010, unknown): “[24,25] and Reuman et al.”
Ecological stoichiometry in leaves, roots, litters and soil among different plant communities in a desertified region of Northern China (2018, background): “Under this condition, to what extent do plants exhibit stoichiometric homeostasis? Soil C, N and P are affected by organic matter, litter and microbes (Mulder and Elser, 2009; Sinsabaugh et al., 2008), and plants adjust their growth rates by adjusting the ratio of C, N and P (Daufresne and Loreau, 2”
Connecting the green and brown worlds . allometric and stoichiometric predictability of above- and below-ground networks (2013, background): “…links in agroecosystems food webs show animals preying on (abundant) organisms with a much smaller body mass than their own, but these roles vary significantly with changes in the environment, such as for mesofauna, which increases disproportionately in enriched systems (Mulder and Elser, 2009).”