Biodiversity Exploratories

Impact of land-use intensity and landscape structure on the biodiversity and functioning of soil food webs (SOILFOODWEB, 2008-2011)

The German Research Foundation (DFG) established three exemplary large-scale and long-term research sites in the framework of an initiative to advance biodiversity research in Germany (Biodiversity Exploratories). These exploratories establish the scientific infrastructure and develop the intellectual framework needed to address critical questions about changes in biodiversity and to evaluate the impacts of those changes for ecosystem processes. Thus, in the exploratories biodiversity and ecosystem research will be merged at a large scale and with a long-term perspective.

Our project SOILFOODWEB aims at investigating the effects of land-use intensity and landscape context on soil food webs and associated ecosystem functions. The community structure of soil biota in terms of species diversity, functional diversity, body size and abundance distributions will be compared between the three Exploratories (i.e. ecoregions) and two opposite land-use intensities (intensive and extensive) under consideration of landscape structure (heterogeneous to homogeneous). Our laboratory studies aim at identifying key components of soil food webs that may alter below- and aboveground processes. We shall complement the explorative approach of the Biodiversity Exploratories with manipulative experiments in the field and microcosms. Ultimately, a better understanding of the effects of land-use intensity on food-web structure and biodiversity-function relationships in soil will allow establishing management practices that minimize adverse effects on edaphic communities and maintain a high level of functional integrity. Our main hypotheses are:

We expect to find species that take a key position in soil food webs across different ecosystems and thereby contribute disproportionately to ecosystem processes.

We hypothesise that land-use intensity will not affect the biodiversity of different soil taxa in a similar way but that its effects will very much depend on the landscape context.

We expect differential responses of the epigeic soil fauna to changes in land-use intensity and landscape structure.