Mowing did not mitigate the negative effects of nitrogen deposition on soil nematode community in a temperate steppe

Abstract

Soil nematodes are the most numerous components of the soil fauna in terrestrial ecosystems. The occurrence and abundance of nematode trophic groups determine the structure and function of soil food webs. However, little is known about how nitrogen deposition and land-use practice (e.g. mowing) affect soil nematode communities. We investigated the main and interactive effects of nitrogen addition and mowing on soil nematode diversity and biomass carbon in nematode trophic groups in a temperate steppe in northern China. Nitrogen addition and mowing significantly decreased the abundance of soil nematodes and trophic diversity but had no effects on nematode richness and the Shannon-Wiener diversity. Nitrogen addition influenced soil nematode communities through decreasing soil pH. Mowing influenced soil nematode communities through decreasing soil moisture. Nitrogen addition enhanced the bacterial energy channel but mowing promoted fungal energy channel in the soil micro-food web. Our study emphasizes that ecosystem function supported by soil organisms can be greatly influenced by nitrogen deposition, and mowing cannot mitigate the negative effects of nitrogen deposition on soil food webs.

Effect of grassland degradation on soil quality and soil biotic community in a semi-arid temperate steppe

“…In the meadow steppe, we also found that soil carbon stock was lower than the TG (Fig. S3), which may be due to that mowing reduced the accumulation of litter and then decreased the carbon input into soil (Chen et al 2019;Li et al 2020). The negative impacts of grassland degradation on aboveground biomass and non-significant effects on belowground biomass in this study resulted in an increase in root shoot ratio, which can change the plant biomass allocation (Gao et al 2008).…”

Database and primer selections affect nematode community composition under different vegetations of Changbai Mountain

“…Soil nematodes represent a major component of soil communities in terrestrial ecosystems, and play an important role in regulating nutrient cycling and soil health (Kouser et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Swanepoel et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021). In the past few decades, the rapid development of molecular techniques has the potential to replace traditional morphological analysis (Floyd et al, 2002;Griffiths et al, 2018;Gao et al, 2021).…”