Land-use changes negatively affect soil fauna communities: preliminary results of a meta-analysis

MORENO, MARÍA LAURA; CHIAPPERO MF; ROSETTI, ROSA; PEREZ HARGUINDEGUY, N.

Conferencia; GEO BON OPEN SCIENCE CONFERENCE & ALL HANDS MEETING; 2020

GEOBON

Soil fauna plays an important role for delivering ecosystem services, such as food production, climatemitigation and soil erosion. However, land-use changes can alter the characteristics of soil faunacommunities which could affect the functioning of the ecosystems. Research into anthropogeniceffects on soil has grown in recent decades. After this data generation, there is a need to synthesizeland-use effect on soil biodiversity in order to identify general patterns. We conducted a metaanalysis to assess the effect of land- use changes on the abundance, richness and diversity of soilinvertebrates. We performed a search in online databases to find studies comparing soil invertebratecommunities in reference/natural sites (primary and secondary forests and grasslands) withcommunities in sites under different uses: agriculture, plantations, logging and pastures. Weidentified 146 suitable studies evaluating land-use change effects. The overall effects of land-usechanges across all studies were negative and significant for three community characteristics althoughthe effects were more pronounced for abundance and species richness of invertebrates. It remains tobe examined if these effects vary according to type of land use, time since land change, taxonomicgroup of invertebrates among other moderator variables. Our results indicate a strong reduction ofsoil fauna communities in anthropogenic landscapes, which may severely compromise ecosystemservices essential for human wellbeing.