Global change and their environmental stressors have a significant
impact on soil biodiversity -- a meta-analysis
Abstract
Anthropogenic global changes are impacting biodiversity, however, many
previous meta-analyses investigating the impact of different global
changes on biodiversity have omitted soil fauna, or are limited in the
scope of the global changes studied. Threats to soil biodiversity by
global changes need to be understood to mitigate effects on ecosystem
services provided by soils. We conducted a meta-analysis using 3,173
effect sizes from 627 publications focused on six global changes
(climate change, land-use intensification, pollution, nutrient
enrichment, invasive species, and habitat fragmentation) and their
associated environmental stressors on soil fauna. We classified
stressors as either pulse (short-term, acute) or press (long-term,
chronic) stressors, and expected pulse stressors to have less impact on
soil biodiversity due to buffering effects of the soil. Unexpectedly,
pollution caused the largest loss in soil fauna communities, which is
worrying due to continually increasing levels of pollution, as well as
the poor mechanistic understanding of pollution impacts. There was no
clear pattern of pulse stressors having a smaller impact on soil
biodiversity than press stressors. Overall, this work shows the
importance of including soil biodiversity in large-scale global change
analyses, as soil organisms often do not show the same responses as
organisms above-ground.