Differential effects of soil trophic networks on microbial decomposition activity in mountain ecosystems

Frontiers in soil ecology—Insights from the World Biodiversity Forum 2022

“…Meta‐analytical approaches have allowed to advance our knowledge about global patterns in soil biodiversity (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, 2016; van den Hoogen et al, 2019; Phillips et al, 2019; Potapov et al 2020); however, these approaches are also very ‘noisy’ and rarely use directly comparable data. Existing integrative studies linked environmental DNA (eDNA) with functional indicators and showed an overall positive relationship between soil multidiversity and multifunctionality (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, 2020b), and how trophic regulation shapes soil functioning (Martinez‐Almoyna et al, 2022), while others emphasized the importance of rare taxa for specific processes (Bahram et al, 2022). Recently, new suggestions for unified data infrastructure and metadata entries, which would strongly improve retrieving and reusing data and biobanking, were published by the European Microbiome Support Consortium (Cernava et al, 2022; Ryan et al, 2021).…”

“…Alternatively, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) allow for such causal inference (Pearl, 2009). Structural equation models (e.g., Eisenhauer et al, 2015; Martinez‐Almoyna et al, 2022) are particular cases of DAG, but other implementations are less constrained and better designed for causal inference. Causal models should include all relevant groups of soil biota and variables of the studied ecosystem and should be carefully constructed, based on theoretical and empirical knowledge (although graphical models could be used first to get a rough idea of the partial dependencies between all variables).…”

“…Yet, the richness of soil organisms has been positively related to multifunctionality at large scales, when measured both within a trophic level and across trophic levels, that is, multitrophic diversity (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, 2020b; Schuldt et al, 2018; Soliveres et al, 2016). Changes in the functional composition of soil communities (functional beta‐diversity) have also been related to changes in ecosystem functions across different trophic levels (Martinez‐Almoyna et al, 2022; Steinwandter et al, 2018). Particularly representative functional metrics can be community metabolism or energy flux (Barnes et al, 2018; Jochum & Eisenhauer, 2022; Mathieu et al, 2022).…”

“…Such biotic interactions result in nonrandom co‐occurrences and affect species–environment relationships, which makes disentangling community interactions from environmental associations a challenge, especially at large scales. Advanced molecular methods, such as metagenomics and transcriptomics, across large scales, could provide further insights into the spatial association between species (exemplified in Bahram et al, 2018b) or trophic or functional groups (Martinez‐Almoyna et al, 2022; Ohlmann et al, 2018). Assessing the distribution of functional genes to measure ecosystem functioning : The distribution of functional genes may better reflect ecosystem functions compared to taxonomic diversity (Bahram et al, 2022; Beugnon et al, 2021, see in oceanic studies, Louca et al, 2016).…”

“…Such biotic interactions result in nonrandom co‐occurrences and affect species–environment relationships, which makes disentangling community interactions from environmental associations a challenge, especially at large scales. Advanced molecular methods, such as metagenomics and transcriptomics, across large scales, could provide further insights into the spatial association between species (exemplified in Bahram et al, 2018b) or trophic or functional groups (Martinez‐Almoyna et al, 2022; Ohlmann et al, 2018).…”