PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lucie Zinger
AU  - Pierre Taberlet
AU  - Heidy Schimann
AU  - Aurélie Bonin
AU  - Frédéric Boyer
AU  - Marta De Barba
AU  - Philippe Gaucher
AU  - Ludovic Gielly
AU  - Charline Giguet-Covex
AU  - Amaia Iribar
AU  - Maxime Réjou-Méchain
AU  - Gilles Rayé
AU  - Delphine Rioux
AU  - Vincent Schilling
AU  - Blaise Tymen
AU  - Jérôme Viers
AU  - Cyril Zouiten
AU  - Wilfried Thuiller
AU  - Eric Coissac
AU  - Jérôme Chave
TI  - Soil community assembly varies across body sizes in a tropical forest
AID  - 10.1101/154278
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 154278
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154278.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154278.full
AB  - The relative influence of deterministic niche-based (i.e. abiotic conditions, biotic interactions) and stochastic-distance dependent neutral processes (i.e. demography, dispersal) in shaping communities has been extensively studied for various organisms, but is far less explored jointly across the tree of life, in particular in soil environments. Here, using a thorough DNA-based census of the whole soil biota in a large tropical forest plot, we show that soil aluminium, topography, and plant species identity are all important drivers of soil richness and community composition. Body size emerges as an important feature of the comparative ecology of the different taxa at the studied spatial scale, with microorganisms being more importantly controlled by environmental factors, while soil mesofauna rather display random spatial distribution. We infer that niche-based processes contribute differently to community assembly across trophic levels due to spatial scaling. Body size could hence help better quantifying important properties of multitrophic assemblages.