Abstract

Plant invasions often act as ecosystem 'simplifiers to simplify diversity and community structure of soil biota. However, inconsistent relationships between plant invasion and soil fauna have been found and few studies have addressed how soil fauna communities change upon plant invasions across taxa and feeding guilds. Here, we investigated the effects of moso bamboo (Phyllostachys adults) invasion in subtropical China on soil mesofauna communities using novel high-throughput sequencing (HTS). Specifically, we analyzed the spatio-temporal dynamics of fauna diversity and feeding guilds in the litter and soil layers for three stages of moso bamboo invasion, i.e., uninvaded (secondary broadleaved forest), moderately invaded (mixed bamboo forest) and completely invaded (P. edulis forest). Overall. we found that the completely invaded bamboo forest decreased species richness and diversity of total fauna, herbivores, and microbivores consistently across different soil layers, but less so detritivores and predators. Although we did not find any interaction effects of bamboo invasion and soil layers on soil fauna diversity indices, significant interaction effects were found on the community composition, for total fauna and their feeding guilds. Specifically, the detrimental effects of bamboo invasion on the trophic structure of soil fauna communities were more profound in the litter layer than in the soil layer, suggesting that a litter layer with more diverse taxa does not mean higher resistance to plant invasion in maintaining the soil food web structure. Taken together, our findings suggest that different responses within fauna feeding guilds to plant invasion were pervasive, and a deeper soil layer may better alleviate the negative effects of pant invasion on fauna community structure. These shifts in soil biodiversity may further degrade ecosystem functioning. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

Ecosystem function; High-throughput sequencing; Metabarcoding; Plant invasion; Soil fauna; Trophic structure

Published in

Science of the Total Environment
2021, Volume: 789, article number: 147982
Publisher: ELSEVIER

SLU Authors

• Kardol, Paul

  • Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Associated SLU-program

SLU Plant Protection Network


UKÄ Subject classification

Ecology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.147982

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/113268