It is known that the bottom-up effect, feedback from feeding resource to top predator, is a key factor in controlling the impact of climate change on soil animals. Feedback from the green food web, producer based way, and brown food web, detritus based way, together affects soil biodiversity and related ecosystem functions.

It remains unclear whether the response of soil fauna to climate change is detritus-based or producer-based resource driven. This could hamper the perception of pathway between climate change and underground ecosystem.

A recent study was conducted by Prof. WU Donghui, SUN Xin and Associated Prof. CHANG Liang from Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology found that green more than brown food resources drive the effect of simulated climate change on Collembola through increased plant and microbial biomass.

They conduct a long-term, soil transplantation experiment across three provinces in Northeast China, From Heilongjiang to Jilin and Liaoning, from 2011 to 2013. They divided three food resource scenarios: soybean cultivation which is considered as a normal green food resource; Land abandonment that is considered as a green and brown food resource; vegetation removal which is considered as a brown food resource.

Considering all the feeding resource through plant and microbe would accumulate in the biomass of the predator, Collembola, in the soil ecosystem, Collembola were chosen as the research taxa and their density and biomass of Collembola is calculated in the final structural equation modeling.

It is found that due to the drastic reduction of green food resources, vegetation removal can slow down the impact of soil transplantation on Collembola. During the period when green food resources rather than brown food resources are regulated, the soil transplantation to warmer region can increase the density and biomass of Collembola.

"An impressive work in topic of the interactions between climate change and Collembola", said Prof. ZHANG Feng from Nanjing Agricultural University.

This study detangled the climate change mainly affects mesofauna through green feeding resource channel, which has important guiding significance for farmland carbon sequestration under climate change. This study has been published in an article entitled “Green more than brown food resources drive the effect of simulated climate change on Collembola: A soil transplantation experiment in northeast China” in Geoderma.

Contact

CHANG Liang

Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology

E-mail:springtail@iga.ac.cn