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Research article2020Peer reviewedOpen access

Soil functional biodiversity and biological quality under threat: Intensive land use outweighs climate change

Yin, Rui; Kardol, Paul; Thakur, Madhav P.; Gruss, Iwona; Wu, Gao-Lin; Eisenhauer, Nico; Schaedler, Martin

Abstract

Climate change and land use intensification are the two most common global change drivers of biodiversity loss. Like other organisms, the soil meso-fauna are expected to modify their functional diversity and composition in response to climate and land use changes. Here, we investigated the functional responses of Collembola, one of the most abundant and ecologically important groups of soil invertebrates. This study was conducted at the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF) in central Germany, where we tested the effects of climate (ambient vs. 'future' as projected for this region for the years between 2070 and 2100), land use (conventional farming, organic farming, intensively-used meadow, extensively-used meadow, and extensively-used pasture), and their interactions on the functional diversity (FD), community-weighted mean (CWM) traits (life-history, morphology), and functional composition of Collembola, as well as the Soil Biological Quality-Collembola (QBS-c) index. We found that land use was overwhelmingly the dominant driver of shifts in functional diversity, functional traits, and functional composition of Collembola, and of shifts in soil biological quality. These significant land use effects were mainly due to the differences between the two main land use types, i.e. cropland vs. grasslands. Specifically, Collembola functional biodiversity and soil biological quality were significantly lower in croplands than grasslands. However, no interactive effect of climate x land use was found in this study, suggesting that land use effects on Collembola were independent of the climate change scenario. Overall, our study shows that functional responses of Collembola are highly vulnerable to land use intensification under both climate scenarios. We conclude that land use changes reduce functional biodiversity and biological quality of soil.

Keywords

Community-weighted mean; Functional composition; Functional traits; Global change; Land use intensification; Soil fauna

Published in

Soil Biology and Biochemistry
2020, Volume: 147, article number: 107847Publisher: PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

    Sustainable Development Goals

    SDG13 Climate action
    SDG15 Life on land

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Soil Science
    Climate Research

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.107847

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/106695