Department of Biology, Biodiversity and Conservation Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2012;7(8):e43292. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043292. Epub 2012 Aug 22.
Very few principles have been unraveled that explain the relationship between soil properties and soil biota across large spatial scales and different land-use types. Here, we seek these general relationships using data from 52 differently managed grassland and forest soils in three study regions spanning a latitudinal gradient in Germany. We hypothesize that, after extraction of variation that is explained by location and land-use type, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in the abundance and diversity of soil biota. If the relationships between predictors and soil organisms were analyzed individually for each predictor group, soil properties explained the highest amount of variation in soil biota abundance and diversity, followed by land-use type and sampling location. After extraction of variation that originated from location or land-use, abiotic soil properties explained significant amounts of variation in fungal, meso- and macrofauna, but not in yeast or bacterial biomass or diversity. Nitrate or nitrogen concentration and fungal biomass were positively related, but nitrate concentration was negatively related to the abundances of Collembola and mites and to the myriapod species richness across a range of forest and grassland soils. The species richness of earthworms was positively correlated with clay content of soils independent of sample location and land-use type. Our study indicates that after accounting for heterogeneity resulting from large scale differences among sampling locations and land-use types, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in fungal and soil fauna abundance or diversity. However, soil biota was also related to processes that act at larger spatial scales and bacteria or soil yeasts only showed weak relationships to soil properties. We therefore argue that more general relationships between soil properties and soil biota can only be derived from future studies that consider larger spatial scales and different land-use types.
很少有原则可以解释土壤特性与土壤生物群落在大空间尺度和不同土地利用类型之间的关系。在这里，我们使用来自德国三个研究区域的 52 个不同管理的草地和森林土壤的数据来寻找这些一般关系。我们假设，在提取由位置和土地利用类型解释的变异后，土壤特性仍然可以解释土壤生物群丰富度和多样性的很大比例的变异。如果针对每个预测因子组单独分析预测因子与土壤生物之间的关系，则土壤特性可以解释土壤生物丰富度和多样性变异的最大量，其次是土地利用类型和采样位置。在提取由位置或土地利用产生的变异后，非生物土壤特性可以解释真菌、中型和大型土壤动物丰富度和多样性的很大一部分变异，但不能解释酵母或细菌生物量或多样性的变异。硝酸盐或氮浓度与真菌生物量呈正相关，但硝酸盐浓度与跳虫和螨的丰度以及森林和草地土壤中多足类物种丰富度呈负相关。蚯蚓的物种丰富度与土壤的粘粒含量呈正相关，而与采样位置和土地利用类型无关。我们的研究表明，在考虑到采样位置和土地利用类型之间大尺度差异导致的异质性后，土壤特性仍然可以解释真菌和土壤动物丰富度或多样性变化的很大一部分。然而，土壤生物群也与在较大空间尺度上起作用的过程有关，而细菌或土壤酵母仅与土壤特性显示出较弱的关系。因此，我们认为，只有考虑更大的空间尺度和不同的土地利用类型，才能从未来的研究中得出土壤特性与土壤生物群之间的更一般关系。
