Soil networks become more connected and take up more carbon as nature restoration progresses
By Elly Morriën, S. Hannula, L. Basten Snoek, N. Helmsing, H. Zweers, M. de Hollander, Raquel Luján Soto, M. Bouffaud, Marc Buée, W. Dimmers and 22 more. Nature Communications, 2017
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Soil organisms have an important role in aboveground community dynamics and ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems. However, most studies have considered soil biota as a black box or focussed on specific groups, whereas little is known about entire soil networks. Here we show that during the course of nature restoration on abandoned arable land a compositional shift in soil biota, preceded by tightening of the belowground networks, corresponds with enhanced efficiency of carbon uptake. In mid- and long-term abandoned field soil, carbon uptake by fungi increases without an increase in fungal biomass or shift in bacterial-to-fungal ratio. The implication of our findings is that during nature restoration the efficiency of nutrient cycling and carbon uptake can increase by a shift in fungal composition and/or fungal activity. Therefore, we propose that relationships between soil food web structure and carbon cycling in soils need to be reconsidered. Effects of habitat restoration on belowground organisms and ecosystem processes are poorly understood. Morriën and colleagues show that changes in the composition and network interactions of soil biota lead to improved carbon uptake efficiency when formerly cultivated land is restored.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbcd26ce033431f1b1d4300f617bcc0e8cdebeba
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Citations in the corpus
- Soil microbiomes with distinct assemblies through vertical soil profiles drive the cycling of multiple nutrients in reforested ecosystems (2018, background): “Reforestation of arable land represents one of the most widely used restoration strategies, one that could restore natural ecosystem functioning and soil properties, but also influence belowground microbial community dynamics [8].”
- The Role of Plant Litter in Driving Plant-Soil Feedbacks (2019, background): “However, other chemicals liberated from plant litter can persist in the soil after senescence and may inhibit the growth or germination of neighboring and next-generation plants (Bonanomi et al., 2011), a phenomenon referred to as allelopathy (Muller, 1966).”
- Soil microbial diversity during 30 years of grassland restoration on the Loess Plateau, China: Tight linkages with plant diversity (2019, background): “For example, Morrien et al. (2017) found that the network complexity in abandoned croplands increased with the stage of succession when all microbes were considered in a co‐occurrence analysis.”