Water availability rather than temperature control soil fauna community structure and prey‐predator interactions

• Published in: Functional Ecology
• Main Authors: Aupic-Samain, Adriane, Baldy, Virginie, Delcourt, Ninon, Krogh, Paul, Henning, Gauquelin, Thierry, Fernandez, Catherine, Santonja, Mathieu
• Other Authors: Institut méditerranéen de biodiversité et d'écologie marine et continentale (IMBE), Avignon Université (AU)-Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-Institut de recherche pour le développement IRD : UMR237-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Aarhus University Aarhus, Program BioDivMeX (BioDiversity of the Mediterranean eXperiment) of the meta-program MISTRALS (Mediterranean Integrated STudies at Regional And Local Scales), ANR-12-BSV7-0016,SEC-PRIME²,Trade-off between SECondary and PRImary MEtabolism in MEditerranean forest under climate change(2012), ANR-11-LABX-0061,OTMed,Objectif Terre : Bassin Méditerranéen(2011), ANR-11-IDEX-0001,Amidex,INITIATIVE D'EXCELLENCE AIX MARSEILLE UNIVERSITE(2011)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: Collembola; functional trait; mite; soil moisture; springtail; top-down control; trophic interaction; Climate change; [SDE]Environmental Sciences; [SDE.BE]Environmental Sciences/Biodiversity and Ecology; Mite; Springtail
• Online Access: https://amu.hal.science/hal-03102477; https://amu.hal.science/hal-03102477/document; https://amu.hal.science/hal-03102477/file/Aupic-Samain%20et%20al.%20Functional%20Ecology%20-%20Postprint.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13745

International audience 1. The ongoing climate change may strongly impact soil biodiversity with cascading effects on the processes they drive. Thus, it is of prime interest to improve our knowledge about responses by soil organisms such as collembolans to expected shifts in environmental conditions by considering communities comprising both detritivores and predators.2. The aim of the present study was to evaluate how simulated climate change and predation under laboratory conditions alter a collembolan community.3. To infer the impact of climate change, we applied a decreased level of soil moisture (60% vs. 30% soil water holding capacity) and an increasing air temperature (15 °C vs. 25 °C) to a collembolan community constituted by four species (Folsomia candida, Protaphorura fimata, Proisotoma minuta and Mesaphorura macrochaeta) exhibiting distinct functional traits, e.g. body size and furca presence, in presence or absence of a predatory gamasid Acari (Stratiolaelaps scimitus) during two months in a microcosm experiment.4. We observed that decreasing soil moisture altered the collembolan community with species‐specific responses. Interaction between soil moisture, temperature and predation indicates that low soil moisture reduced total collembolan abundance especially i) by suppressing the positive effect of increasing temperature and ii) by increasing the predatory control on collembolan abundance.5. These results highlight that soil moisture is the major driver of Collembola community and by consequence, a shift in climatic parameters with the ongoing climate change should strongly modify the Collembola community structure and the predator‐prey interaction. Our findings are highly important since a strengthening of predation impact on Collembola prey could have major consequences on the whole soil food web being able to lead to a slowdown of key ecosystem processes they drive (e.g., litter decomposition and nutrient recycling). Finally, our study promotes the need to study more complex systems considering ...