Soil microfauna mediate multifunctionality under multilevel warming in a primary forest
Abstract
Soil microfauna play a crucial role in maintaining multiple functions associated with soil phosphorous, nitrogen, and carbon cycling. Although both soil microfauna diversity and multifunctionality are strongly affected by climate warming, it remains unclear how their relationships respond to different levels of warming. We conducted a 3-year multilevel warming experiment with five warming treatments in a subtropical primary forest. Using infrared heating systems, the soil surface temperature in plots was maintained at 0.8 ℃, 1.5 ℃, 3.0 ℃, and 4.2 ℃ above ambient temperature (control, CK).
Our findings indicate that low-level (+0.8-1.5 ℃) warming increased soil multifunctionality, nematode, and protist diversity compared to control, while high-level (+4.2 ℃) warming significantly and negatively affected these variables. We also identified significant positive correlations between soil multifunctionality and nematode and protist diversity in the 0-10 cm soil layer. Importantly, we found that soil multifunctionality and protist diversity did not change significantly under temperatures 3.0 ℃ above ambient. Our results imply that an increase of ~3 ℃ may represent a critical threshold in subtropical forests, which is of great importance for identifying response measures to global warming from the perspective of microfauna in the surface soil. Our finding offers new evidence of the role of soil microfauna in regulating multifunctionality with the magnitude of warming in primary forests.
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp4b
The dataset contains soil multifunctionality and species richness of different eukaryotic groups for 20 experimental plots in the 0-10 cm and 10-20 cm soil layers under multilevel warming in a primary forest.
Description of the data and file structure
The plot-level dataset contains one row per experimental plot with soil multifunctionality and species richness of different eukaryotic groups. The abbreviations of these variables are listed below. Further information on the study design, sampling method, and the calculation of these variables is given in the associated manuscript.
Column names
Plot_ID: experimental plots
FU: fungi richness (number, no unit)
PR: protest richness (number, no unit)
NE: nematode richness (number, no unit)
RO: rotifer richness (number, no unit)
TA: tardigrade richness (number, no unit)
AR: arthropod richness (number, no unit)
MU: soil multifunctionality (number, no unit)
Soil layer (cm): sampled with 0-10 cm and 10-20 cm
Row names
CK: ambient temperature
WA: 0.8 ℃ warming
WB: 1.5 ℃ warming
WC: 3.0 ℃ warming
WD: 4.2 ℃ warming