Decoupled responses of plants and soil biota to global change across the world’s land ecosystems
Abstract
Understanding the concurrent responses of aboveground and belowground compartments to global changes is crucial for the maintenance of ecosystem functions and biodiversity conservation. We conducted a comprehensive analysis synthesizing data from 13,209 single observations and 3,223 pairwise observations from 1,166 publications globally to examine the responses of plants and soil organisms and their synchronization. We found that global change factors (GCFs) generally promoted aboveground plant biomass but decreased plant species diversity. In comparison, the responses of belowground soil biota to GCFs were more variable and harder to predict. The analysis of the paired aboveground and belowground observations demonstrated that responses of plants and soil organisms to GCFs are decoupled among diverse groups of soil organisms for different biomes. Our study highlights the importance of integrative research on the aboveground-belowground system for improving predictions regarding the consequences of global environmental change.
The datasets analysed during the current study are available in the DRYAD repository( DOI: 10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rc23).
Description of repository:
This repository contains all of the code and data used to assess Decoupled responses of aboveground plants and soil biota to global change.
All data and analyses mentioned in this study were conducted in R 4.0.5 (R core team 2019).
The datafile contains the following files:
Seven datasets:
above_biomass.csv Metadata for aboveground plant biomass.
above_diversity.csv Metadata for aboveground plant diversity.
below_root_biomass.csv Metadata for belowground plant biomass.
below_biomass.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota biomass.
below_diversity.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota diversity.
below_abundance.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota abundance.
data.csv Metadata for both aboveground plant and belowground soil biota attributes.
All variables in the datasets:
Field Description
Serial Number of the publication in our datasets
Study First author of the publication
Relationship type Types of plant and soil biota attributes collected from an observation
Climate region Climate region of the experiments
vegetation Vegetation types of aboveground plants
Latitude Latitude of the experiments
Longitude Longitude of the experiments
MAT Mean annual temperature (Celsius)
MAP Mean annual precipitation (mm)
Treatments Treatments of Global Change Factors
Duration Duration of experimental treatment (year)
Intensity Intensity of experimental treatment
Unit_treatment Units of treatment intensity
Unit_above or Unit Attribute unit of aboveground plants
T_CK_above Relative difference of the plants attribute between treatments and controls
yi or yi_above Log transformed relative difference of the plants attribute
vi or vi_above The variance of the relative difference aboveground
Biota Major taxa of soil biota
Species Minor taxa of soil biota
Unit_below or Unit Attribute unit of belowground soil biota
T_CK_below Relative difference of the soil biota attribute between treatments and controls
yi or yi_below Log transformed relative difference of the soil biota attribute
vi or vi_below The variance of the relative difference belowground
This is the code to replicate the analyses and figures from the paper: Decoupled responses of aboveground plants and soil biota to global change.
figure2 - figure4 Codes for output images in the main text.
figureS2 - figureS17 Codes for output images in the supplementary material.
Table1 Code for extracting results in Table1, with the results output in .csv format.
Linear and non-linear model comparison Code for linear and non-linear model comparison, with the results output in .csv format in folders.
Mean effect size The results output in .csv format for table S3 and S4.
Publication bias analysis Code for publication bias analysis, with the results output in .csv format in folders.
Supplemented missing standard deviation.R Code for imputing missing standard deviation.
He C.Q. et al. were responsible for compiling the code. For any questions and usage of the code, please contact the author.
Works are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.