Project Details
Projekt
LitterLinks2 - Changes in soil food web structure and functioning as influenced by forest management
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568791474
Forestry practices alter biodiversity and soil functioning. Our previous work has shown that forest gap formation can act as a strong disturbance and affects soil-dwelling organisms in different, sometimes opposing, ways. The retention of deadwood in forest gaps can mitigate their negative effects and enhance the density and diversity of soil fauna. However, the relative importance of abiotic versus biotic factors for the impact of deadwood is not known. Our aim is to understand the long-term effects of the formation of forest gaps and the addition of deadwood on soil fauna communities and their ecosystem functions. To this end, we will quantify the changes in functioning and resilience of different taxa. Our focus is on the Forest Gap Experiment (FOX), in which we record meso- and macrofaunal species diversity, community composition and biomass in two-year sampling intervals, complementing our previous data from 2021, 2023 and 2025. Functional shifts will be quantified by analysing energy fluxes in the decomposer food webs, using state-of-the-art techniques such as compound-specific isotope analysis of amino acids to reconstruct basal resources, energy fluxes and trophic positions. To better understand the mechanisms for the effects of deadwood on soil animal communities and how the latter are affected by climatic variations, we will additionally utilise the new BEClimWood experiment, which allows disentangling biotic and abiotic factors. These objectives will be achieved in three work packages (WP), where WP1 focuses on the long-term analysis of the effects of forest gap creation and deadwood addition on the abundance, diversity and biomass of soil fauna and microbes in the FOX, WP2 tracks the temporal dynamics of soil energy fluxes and functions in the FOX, and WP3 deciphers the effects of deadwood and climate on mesofauna and microbes in the BEClimWood experiment. In addition to analyzing soil animal communities at the species level and quantifying energy fluxes within food webs, we will determine microbial biomass (Cmic) using substrate-induced respiration and the composition of functional microbial communities using phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) measurements. The quantification of microbial communities will provide valuable insights into the biotic processes at the base of soil food webs and thus contribute to the understanding of changes in animal communities and energy channelling due to the formation of forest gaps and the introduction of deadwood.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 1374:
Biodiversity Exploratories
