RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Soil community assembly varies across body sizes in a tropical forest
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 154278
DO 10.1101/154278
A1 Lucie Zinger
A1 Pierre Taberlet
A1 Heidy Schimann
A1 Aurélie Bonin
A1 Frédéric Boyer
A1 Marta De Barba
A1 Philippe Gaucher
A1 Ludovic Gielly
A1 Charline Giguet-Covex
A1 Amaia Iribar
A1 Maxime Réjou-Méchain
A1 Gilles Rayé
A1 Delphine Rioux
A1 Vincent Schilling
A1 Blaise Tymen
A1 Jérôme Viers
A1 Cyril Zouiten
A1 Wilfried Thuiller
A1 Eric Coissac
A1 Jérôme Chave
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/23/154278.abstract
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.