Speaker
Description
Soil biogeochemical cycles are regulated by soil food webs. However, variations in soil food web structure and functioning across major environmental gradients remain largely unknown, hampering generalisations of links between soil fauna and biogeochemistry. Here, I summarise our several recent projects applying energy flux approach to explore successional development of soil animal food webs and responses of their structure and functioning to climate type and land use. Aligned with the classical ecosystem development theory, we show that along a secondary succession in China, soil food webs develop from fast turnover systems with high herbivory and predation (‘green’ state) to low turnover systems based on detritus consumption (‘brown’ state). We further found a similar trend while comparing energy distribution across micro-, meso- and macrofauna in temperate (Germany, Russia) and tropical forest soil food webs (Vietnam, Indonesia). We show that tropical soil food webs have high energy flux, predation rates and herbivory, while temperate food webs have high bacterivory and litter feeding. Finally, comparison of forests versus agricultural systems in Indonesia and Argentina shows that land use does not result in reduced energy flux in soil food webs, but strongly restructures energy pathways depending on land-use type. In intensively managed systems a drop in predation and an increase in basal consumption typically is observed, mainly explained by earthworm dominance. Our studies show how the functioning of soil animal food webs changes across ecosystem stages and types, summarising functional roles animals play in different biomes.
| Status Group | Senior Scientist |
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