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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 24, 2025

Experimental Protocol for Manipulating Plant-induced Soil Heterogeneity

Experimental Protocol for Manipulating Plant-induced Soil Heterogeneity

Published on: March 13, 2014

Multiple environmental controls explain global patterns in soil animal communities.

Alice S A Johnston¹, Richard M Sibly²

¹School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AH, UK. alice.johnston@reading.ac.uk.

|April 9, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Global soil animal communities show distinct latitudinal shifts in size and abundance. Mean annual temperature, soil pH, and organic carbon content are key environmental drivers of these mass-abundance scaling relationships.

Keywords:

Community composition Mass–abundance Size spectra Soil animals Soil organic carbon Soil pH Temperature

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Area of Science:

Ecology
Soil Science
Biodiversity Research

Background:

Soil animals are crucial for ecosystem functions, yet environmental influences on their communities remain unclear.
Understanding these controls is vital for predicting ecosystem stability and services.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the environmental controls on soil animal community composition using mass-abundance scaling relationships.
To identify key climatic and edaphic factors shaping global soil animal communities.

Main Methods:

Compiled a global dataset of soil animal communities, recording abundance and body mass for multiple groups.
Applied hierarchical linear mixed effects modeling to analyze mass-abundance scaling relationships and environmental drivers.

Main Results:

Observed a clear latitudinal gradient: high abundance of small soil animals at high latitudes versus larger animals at low latitudes.
Identified mean annual temperature, soil pH, and soil organic carbon as significant predictors of global mass-abundance scaling relationships (R²c = 0.828).

Conclusions:

Mean annual temperature, soil pH, and soil organic carbon content are key environmental controls on global soil animal mass-abundance scaling.
These findings extend previous observations from microbial communities to soil animal communities at a global scale.
Further global datasets are needed to confirm these relationships across diverse ecosystems and soil fauna.