Grassland management effects on earthworm communities under ambient and future climatic conditions

Abstract

The impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be modulated by other changing environmental conditions (e.g. induced by land‐use change). The potential interactive effects of climate change and land use have rarely been studied for soil organisms. To test the effects of changing climatic conditions and land use on soil invertebrates, we examined earthworm communities across different seasons in different grassland‐use types (intensively managed grassland, extensively managed meadow and extensively managed sheep pasture). We predicted that the strength of climate change effects would vary with season and land use. Overall, extracted earthworm populations showed the strongest variations in response to the season, indicating major differences in activity patterns and extraction efficiency, whereas climate change and different grassland‐use types had fewer and weaker effects. Future climate, characterized by slightly higher precipitation in spring and autumn but a strong reduction during the summer, had positive effects on the abundance of extracted adult earthworms in spring but then reduced the abundance of active earthworms across the remaining seasons. In contrast, the total biomass of juveniles tended to be consistently lower under future climate conditions. Earthworm species responded differently to the climate change and different grassland management types, and these species‐specific responses further varied strongly across seasons. Intensive grassland management had negative effects, due to plant community composition, whereas sheep grazing favoured earthworm populations, due to dung deposition. There were only limited interactive effects between climate and land use, which thus did not support our main hypothesis. Nevertheless, these results highlight the complex and context‐dependent responses of earthworm communities and activity patterns to climate change, with potential consequences for long‐term population dynamics and crucial ecosystem functions. Highlights We explored earthworm communities in response to climate change, different grassland‐use types and seasons Climate had species‐specific effects on active earthworms, but few interactions with land‐use type Intensive grassland management decreased, but sheep grazing favoured, active earthworm populations Strong seasonal variations in earthworm activity periods will be modulated by climate change

Soil properties changes earthworm diversity indices in different agro-ecosystem

“…The input of organic manures and nonconventional farming system also improves soil quality which promotes earthworm presence within the soil [21,25]. Singh et al [26] also reported that the use of sheep dung in the intensive grassland management increase the earthworm population and their abundance and number increase up to four times which directly affected the earthworm diversity indices [27]. The present study also reported that agricultural management practices such as ploughing, tillage etc.…”

Biotic and abiotic controls on carbon storage in aggregates in calcareous alpine and prealpine grassland soils

“…Moreover, the quality of this organic matter showed the lowest alkyl-C/O-N-alkyl-C ratio and C: N ratio (Table 2) than in Graswang and Esterberg. Singh et al (2020) showed as in temperate grasslands the earthworms preferred plant residues with low C: N ratio.…”

“…The passage of soil and organic matter through the earthworm gut creates casts formed from differently sized aggregates (Angst et al 2017). Most of the studies about the role of earthworms for C sequestration through aggregation were carried out in agricultural soils (Bossuyt et al 2005;Pulleman et al 2005) and forest soils (Lubbers et al 2013;Zhang et al 2013), but has rarely been studied in grassland soils (Singh et al 2020;Wu et al 2017), despite as compared to other habitats in temperate ecosystems, earthworms are generally more abundant and diverse in grasslands (Keith et al 2018;Spurgeon et al 2013;Singh et al 2020) . Concerning the role of earthworms in soil aggregation, an important information is not only their quantity but also their ecological niche classification, which is based on their feeding guilds, commonly named epigeic, endogeic, and anecic (Bouché 1977;Shipitalo and Le Bayon 2004).…”

Type of organic fertilizer rather than organic amendment per se increases abundance of soil biota

“…Besides determination of abundance, body masses were also estimated for springtails, mites and earthworms as intensive management practices may select for soil arthropod communities with particular life history traits ( Birkhofer et al, 2017 ), such as small body size, and may decrease earthworm biomass ( Singh et al, 2021 ). The body length of each springtail was measured under a microscope and, for each sample (four samples per plot), the mean body length of each collembolan sub-family was estimated.…”