Tropical land use alters functional diversity of soil food webs and leads to monopolization of the detrital energy channel
- University of Göttingen, Germany
- Institut Pertanian Bogor, Indonesia
Abstract
Agricultural expansion is among the main threats to biodiversity and functions of tropical ecosystems. It has been shown that conversion of rainforest into plantations erodes biodiversity, but further consequences for food-web structure and energetics of belowground communities remains little explored. We used a unique combination of stable isotope analysis and food web energetics to analyze in a comprehensive way consequences of the conversion of rainforest into oil palm and rubber plantations on the structure of and channeling of energy through soil animal food webs in Sumatra, Indonesia. Across the 23 animal groups studied, most of the taxa switched to freshly-fixed plant carbon (low Δ13C values) indicating 'fast' energy channeling in plantations as opposed to 'slow' energy channeling through the detrital pathway in rainforests (high Δ13C values). These shifts led to changes in isotopic divergence, dispersion, evenness and uniqueness. However, earthworms as major detritivores stayed unchanged in their trophic niche and monopolized the detrital pathway in plantations, resulting in similar energetic metrics across land-use systems. Functional diversity metrics of soil food webs were associated with reduced amount of litter, tree density and species richness in plantations, providing guidelines how to improve the complexity of the structure of and channeling of energy through soil food webs. Our results highlight the strong restructuring of soil food webs with the conversion of rainforest into plantations threatening soil functioning and ecosystem stability in the long term.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file
Article and author information
Author details
Valentyna Krashevska
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (192626868-SFB 990)
- Zheng Zhou
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (192626868-SFB 990)
- Valentyna Krashevska
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (192626868-SFB 990)
- Rahayu Widyastuti
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (192626868-SFB 990)
- Stefan Scheu
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (192626868-SFB 990)
- Anton Potapov
China Scholarship Council (202004910314)
- Zheng Zhou
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Zhou et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Tropical land use alters functional diversity of soil food webs and leads to monopolization of the detrital energy channel
eLife 11:e75428.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75428
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