Publication
A diversity of diversities: evaluating the relationships between below and aboveground biodiversity
Publisher:
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date:
07-06-2023
DOI:
10.1101/2023.06.07.544003
Abstract: Understanding the ersity and composition of ecological communities is a key component in predicting future bio ersity responses to environmental change and implications for ecosystem health. Linking across the domains of life and trophic levels is also essential for understanding whole-ecosystem dynamics but is often challenging to perform and limited in scope. In particular, it is unclear to what extent cross-domain correlations in bio ersity are determined by common abiotic drivers or species interactions. Here we analyse data from a unique bio ersity dataset gathered across a variety of oceanic temperate terrestrial habitats comprising 300 sites with co-located soil microbial, plant, bird and pollinator surveys along with climate and soil physicochemical information. Soil microbial groups are analysed using metabarcoding of the 16S, ITS and 18S DNA regions, allowing in depth characterisation of microbial community composition and ersity. Using Bayesian hierarchical regression models, we show that a positive correlation between plant ersity and soil bacterial and fungal ersity is actually driven by non-linear responses to changing soil pH, with the exception of AM fungi which show positive associations with plant ersity at low soil pH. However, positive associations between plant ersity and bird, and pollinator ersity persisted after accounting for changes in climate. The composition of soil bacteria, fungi, bees, butterflies and birds are all impacted by the plant community in conjunction with edaphic factors. The heterotrophic protistan community strongly tracks the bacterial community in both ersity and composition. The residual associations between taxa after accounting for environmental variation in a joint species distribution model revealed cross-domain correlations. Overall, our results comprehensively show the differential responses, linkages and ergences of cross-Kingdom ersity and composition in aboveground-belowground ecological communities to environmental and biotic properties.