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Responses of forest snail assemblages to soil acidity buffer system and liming

  • Original Article
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Ecological Research

Abstract

Physiological constraints from harsh environmental conditions, such as from calcium limitation on acidic soils, is expected not only to affect species richness, but also species abundance distributions. Also, the effects of amendments by calcium addition (soil liming) on these assemblage characteristics are poorly understood. Because of their sensitivity towards calcium availability, we use snails as model organisms and integrate field surveys and literature data. Temperate forest snail data supported a rule-of-thumb calibration with pH measurements in water being one unit higher than in KCl buffer. The resulting large data set suggests stepwise changes in snail richness that occur at transitions in soil buffer systems, especially at pH 3.2. Species abundance distributions follow the logseries model in most soil buffer systems, except for the iron buffer range (pH ≤3.2) where they swap to the geometric model. Our findings thus suggest several smaller soil pH thresholds for snail assemblages associated with shifts between soil buffer systems, and a tipping point at the threshold to pH ≤3.2. Liming with ground carbonate rocks is a technique to temporarily increase soil pH and calcium availability in forest soils, but its effects on snail assemblages produced inconsistent results that did not meet expectations from the ameliorated soil pH and might warrant a re-evaluation of liming applications.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks are due to U. Schulte (LÖBF NRW) and the numerous forestry offices and forest owners for sampling permissions. We would especially like to thank W. Wehr (formerly forestry office Montabaur) for the detailed information on the limed forests. Brian J. McGill (University of Maine) kindly made the SAD Toolkit available. Thor-Seng Liew, Anton J. de Winter and Menno Schilthuizen (all three from Naturalis, Leiden), Jeffrey C. Nekola (University New Mexico), and Benoît Goossens (Cardiff University/Danau Girang Field Centre) kindly commented on a former version of this manuscript. We also acknowledge the helpful comments of the two anonymous reviewers. HK received funding from the project on determinants of snail species diversity on limestone outcrops (ALW 821.01.002) by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) during manuscript preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Terrestrial Ecology, Zoological Institute, Cologne Biocenter, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Str. 47b, 50674, Cologne, Germany

    Heike Kappes & Werner Topp

  2. Naturalis Biodiversity Center, P.O. Box 9517, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Heike Kappes

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  1. Heike Kappes
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Correspondence to Heike Kappes.

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Kappes, H., Topp, W. Responses of forest snail assemblages to soil acidity buffer system and liming. Ecol Res 29, 757–766 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-014-1167-9

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