Dataset Information

Land-use and land-management change: relationships with earthworm and fungi communities and soil structural properties.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Change in land use and management can impact massively on soil ecosystems. Ecosystem engineers and other functional biodiversity in soils can be influenced directly by such change and this in turn can affect key soil functions. Here, we employ meta-analysis to provide a quantitative assessment of the effects of changes in land use and land management across a range of successional/extensification transitions (conventional arable???no or reduced tillage???grassland???wooded land) on community metrics for two functionally important soil taxa, earthworms and fungi. An analysis of the relationships between community change and soil structural properties was also included.

Results

Meta-analysis highlighted a consistent trend of increased earthworm and fungal community abundances and complexity following transitions to lower intensity and later successional land uses. The greatest changes were seen for early stage transitions, such as introduction of reduced tillage regimes and conversion to grassland from arable land. Not all changes, however, result in positive effects on the assessed community metrics. For example, whether woodland conversion positively or negatively affects community size and complexity depends on woodland type and, potentially, the changes in soil properties, such as pH, that may occur during conversion. Alterations in soil communities tended to facilitate subsequent changes in soil structure and hydrology. For example, increasing earthworm abundances and functional group composition were shown to be positively correlated with water infiltration rate (dependent on tillage regime and habitat characteristics); while positive changes in fungal biomass measures were positively associated with soil microaggregate stability.

Conclusions

These findings raise the potential to manage landscapes to increase ecosystem service provision from soil biota in relation to regulation of soil structure and water flow.

SUBMITTER: Spurgeon DJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4219611 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Land-use and land-management change: relationships with earthworm and fungi communities and soil structural properties.

Spurgeon David J DJ Keith Aidan M AM Schmidt Olaf O Lammertsma Dennis R DR Faber Jack H JH

BMC ecology 20131201

<h4>Background</h4>Change in land use and management can impact massively on soil ecosystems. Ecosystem engineers and other functional biodiversity in soils can be influenced directly by such change and this in turn can affect key soil functions. Here, we employ meta-analysis to provide a quantitative assessment of the effects of changes in land use and land management across a range of successional/extensification transitions (conventional arable → no or reduced tillage → grassland → wooded lan ...[more]

PMID: 24289220

Similar Datasets

Project description:Very few principles have been unraveled that explain the relationship between soil properties and soil biota across large spatial scales and different land-use types. Here, we seek these general relationships using data from 52 differently managed grassland and forest soils in three study regions spanning a latitudinal gradient in Germany. We hypothesize that, after extraction of variation that is explained by location and land-use type, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in the abundance and diversity of soil biota. If the relationships between predictors and soil organisms were analyzed individually for each predictor group, soil properties explained the highest amount of variation in soil biota abundance and diversity, followed by land-use type and sampling location. After extraction of variation that originated from location or land-use, abiotic soil properties explained significant amounts of variation in fungal, meso- and macrofauna, but not in yeast or bacterial biomass or diversity. Nitrate or nitrogen concentration and fungal biomass were positively related, but nitrate concentration was negatively related to the abundances of Collembola and mites and to the myriapod species richness across a range of forest and grassland soils. The species richness of earthworms was positively correlated with clay content of soils independent of sample location and land-use type. Our study indicates that after accounting for heterogeneity resulting from large scale differences among sampling locations and land-use types, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in fungal and soil fauna abundance or diversity. However, soil biota was also related to processes that act at larger spatial scales and bacteria or soil yeasts only showed weak relationships to soil properties. We therefore argue that more general relationships between soil properties and soil biota can only be derived from future studies that consider larger spatial scales and different land-use types.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Earthworm communities are generally very sensitive to physico-chemical properties of the soil in different agro-ecosystem i.e. cultivated or non-cultivated which directly or indirectly influence the earthworm survival. The difference in physico-chemical properties of soil at different sites contributed to the formation of population patches for earthworm species. Understanding the physico-chemical properties of soil at a particular site could facilitate the prediction of earthworm species at that site. The objective of the present study was to investigate the diversity, abundance, and distribution of earthworms in cultivated and non-cultivated agroecosystems and their physico-chemical properties affecting the earthworm diversity and abundance. RESULTS:Total 10 species of earthworms i.e. Amynthas alexandri, Amynthas morrisi, Eutyphoeus incommodus, Eutyphoeus waltoni, Metaphire birmanica, Metaphire houlleti, Metaphire posthuma, Octochaetona beatrix, Perionyx excavatus, and Polypheretima elongata, were reported. Out of all the reported species, Metaphire posthuma was found to be the most abundant earthworm species in both cultivated and non-cultivated agroecosystems with the occurrence at 56.81% sites. The Shannon-Wiener index (H), Margalef species richness index (DMg) and Pielou species evenness (E) was ranged from 0 to 0.86, 0 to 0.64 and 0.78 to 1 respectively. The principal component analysis resulted in four principal components i.e. PC1, PC2, PC3 and PC4 which contributing variance (%) of 22.96, 19.37, 14.23 and 10.10 respectively. The principal component analysis also showed that physico-chemical parameters of soil such as EC, pH, TDS, texture, OC, moisture, etc. play a critical role in earthworm distribution. CONCLUSION:The conventional farming system has a negative effect on the earthworm diversity in the soil while the physico-chemical properties of soil also have a determinant effect on the same. Earthworms abundance in the present study have significant direct relation with soil properties at a particular site and vice versa. The diversity indices also change due to the conventional farming system which directly affects the earthworm abundance.

Dataset Information

Land-use and land-management change: relationships with earthworm and fungi communities and soil structural properties.

Background

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Land-use and land-management change: relationships with earthworm and fungi communities and soil structural properties.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets