Abstract
Ground-dwelling arthropod communities are influenced by numerous biotic and abiotic factors. Little is known, however, about the relative importance of vegetation structure and abiotic environmental factors on the patterns of ground-dwelling arthropod community across a wide range of soil salinities. Here, a field survey was conducted to assess the driving forces controlling ground-dwelling arthropod community in the salinized grasslands in the Hexi Corridor, Gansu Province, China. The data were analyzed by variance partitioning with canonical correspondence analysis (CCA). We found that vegetation structure and edaphic factors were at least of similar importance to the pattern of the whole ground-dwelling arthropod community. However, when all collected ground-dwelling arthropods were categorized into three trophic guilds (predators, herbivores, and decomposers), as these groups use different food sources, their populations were controlled by different driving forces. Predators and decomposers were mainly determined by biotic factors such as vegetation cover and aboveground plant biomass and herbivores by plant density and vegetation cover. Abiotic factors were also major determinants for the variation occurring in these guilds, with predators strongly affected by soil electrical conductivity (EC) and the content of fine particles (silt + clay, CS), herbivores by soil N:P, EC, and CS, and decomposers by soil EC and organic matter content (SOM). Since plant cover, density, and aboveground biomass can indicate resource availability, which are mainly constrained by soil N:P, EC, CS, and SOM, we consider that the ground-dwelling arthropod community in the salinized grasslands was mainly influenced by resource availability.
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Acknowledgments
We thank all technicians for their help with field investigation and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41773086, 31400392, 41501572), China national key research and development plan (2016YFC0500907), Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (QYZDJ-SSW-DQC031), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2015 T81068, 2014 M552516), One Hundred Person Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y551821), and the Foundation for Excellent Youth Scholars of CAREERI, CAS (Y451111001).
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Pan, C., Feng, Q., Liu, J. et al. Community structure of grassland ground-dwelling arthropods along increasing soil salinities. Environ Sci Pollut Res 25, 7479–7486 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-1011-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-1011-1