Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community

SHA Di; GAO Meixiang; SUN Xin; WU Donghui; ZHANG Xueping

doi:10.1007/s11769-015-0778-6

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SHA Di, GAO Meixiang, SUN Xin, WU Donghui, ZHANG Xueping. Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community[J]. Chinese Geographical Science, 2015, 25(5): 582-590. doi: 10.1007/s11769-015-0778-6

Citation:

SHA Di, GAO Meixiang, SUN Xin, WU Donghui, ZHANG Xueping. Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community[J]. Chinese Geographical Science, 2015, 25(5): 582-590. doi: 10.1007/s11769-015-0778-6

Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community

doi: 10.1007/s11769-015-0778-6

SHA Di^1,2,
GAO Meixiang^{1,2,3
,},
SUN Xin³,
WU Donghui³,
ZHANG Xueping^1,2

1.
Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Monitoring of Geographic Environment, College of Heilongjiang Province, Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150025, China;
2.
College of Geographical Science, Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150025, China;
3.
Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China

Funds: Under the auspices of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41101049, 41471037, 41371072, 41430857), University Nursing Program for Young Scholars with Creative Talents in Heilongjiang Province (No. UNPYSCT- 2015054), Distinguished Young Scholar of Harbin Normal University (No. KGB201204), Excellent Youth Scholars of Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. DLSYQ13003)

More Information

Corresponding author: GAO Meixiang.E-mail:gmx102@163.com; WU Donghui.E-mail:wudonghui@neigae.ac.cn
Received Date: 2015-04-23
Rev Recd Date: 2015-06-07
Publish Date: 2015-05-27

Abstract

Understanding the underlying processes of how communities are structured remains a central question in community ecology. However, the mechanisms of the soil animal community are still unclear, especially for communities on a small scale. To evaluate the relative roles of biotic interactions and environmental and spatial processes in a soil collembolan community, a field experiment was carried out on a small scale (50 m) in the farmland ecosystem of the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. In August and October, 2011, we took 100 samples each month in a 50 m × 50 m plot using a spatially delimited sampling design. Variation partitioning was used to quantify the relative contributions of the spatial and environmental variables. A null model was selected to test for the non-randomness pattern of species co-occurrence and body size in assemblages of collembolans and to test whether the pattern observed was the result of environmental or biotic processes that structured the community on a small scale. The results showed that large variance was accounted for by spatial variables (18.99% in August and 21.83% in October, both were significant). There were relatively lower effects of environmental variation (3.56% in August and 1.45% in October, neither was significant), while the soil water content, soil pH and soybean height explained a significant portion of the variance that was observed in the spatial pattern of the collembolan community. Furthermore, the null model revealed more co-occurrence than expected by chance, suggesting that collembolan communities had a non-random co-occurrence pattern in both August and October. Additionally, environmental niche overlap and the body size ratio of co-occurrence showed that interspecific competition was not influential in collembolan community structuring. Considering all of the results together, the contributions of spatial and environmental processes were stronger than biotic interactions in the small-scale structuring of a soil collembolan community.
- spatial process,
- environmental filtering,
- biotic interactions,
- variation partitioning,
- small scale,
- collembolan community

References

[1]	Albrecht M, Gotelli N J, 2001. Spatial and temporal niche partitioning in grassland ants. Oecologia, 126(1): 134-141.
[2]	Arbea J I, Zumeta J B, 2001. Ecología de los Colémbolos (Hexapoda, Collembola) en Los Monegros (Zaragoza, España). Boletín de la Sociedad Entomologica Aragonesa, (28): 35-48. (in Spanish)
[3]	Bell T, 2010. Experimental tests of the bacterial distance-decay relationship. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 4: 1357-1365.
[4]	Bello F de, Vandewalle M, Reitalu T et al., 2013. Evidence for scale-and disturbance-dependent trait assembly patterns in dry semi-natural grasslands. Journal of Ecology, 101(5): 1237-1244.
[5]	Bertness M D, Callaway R, 1994. Positive interactions in communities. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 9(5): 191-193.
[6]	Borcard D, Legendre P, 2002. All-scale spatial analysis of ecological data by means of principal coordinates of neighbour matrices. Ecological Modelling, 153(1-2): 51-68.
[7]	Borcard D, Legendre P, Avois-Jacquet C et al., 2004. Dissecting the spatial structure of ecological data at multiple scales. Ecology, 85(7): 1826-1832.
[8]	Caruso T, Chan Y, Lacap D C et al., 2011. Stochastic and deterministic processes interact in the assembly of desert microbial communities on a global scale. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 5(9): 1406-1413.
[9]	Caruso T, Trokhymets V, Bargagli R et al., 2013. Biotic interactions as a structuring force in soil communities: evidence from the micro-arthropods of an Antarctic moss model system. Oecologia, 172(2): 495-503.
[10]	Decaëns T, Margerie P, Aubert M et al., 2008. Assembly rules within earthworm communities in north-western France: a regional analysis. Applied Soil Ecology, 39(3): 321-335.
[11]	Diamond J M, 1975. Assembly of Species Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[12]	Dray S, Legendre P, Peres-Neto P R, 2006. Spatial modelling: a comprehensive framework for principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices (PCNM). Ecological Modelling, 196(3-4): 483-493.
[13]	Dumbrell A J, Nelson M, Helgason T et al., 2010. Relative roles of niche and neutral processes in structuring a soil microbial community. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 4(3): 337-345.
[14]	Emerson B C, Gillespie R G, 2008. Phylogenetic analysis of community assembly and structure over space and time. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 23(11): 619-630.
[15]	Fahrig L, Merriam G, 1994. Conservation of fragmented populations. Conservation Biology, 8(1): 50-59.
[16]	Fuentes M, 2002. Seed dispersal and tree species diversity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 17(12): 550.
[17]	Gao Meixiang, He Ping, Liu Dong et al, 2014. Relative roles of spatial factors, environmental filtering and biotic interactions in fine-scale structuring of a soil mite community. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 79: 68-77.
[18]	Gao Meixiang, He Ping, Sun Xin et al., 2014. Relative contributions of environmental filtering, biotic interactions and dispersal limitation in a soil collembolan community from a temperate deciduous forest in the Maoer Mountains. Chinese Science Bulletin, 59(24): 2426-2438. (in Chinese)
[19]	Gao Meixiang, Sun Xin, Wu Donghui et al., 2014. Spatial autocorrelation at multi-scale of soil collembolan community in farmland of the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. Acta Ecologica Sinica, 34(17): 4980-4990. (in Chinese)
[20]	Gotelli N J, 2000. Null model analysis of species co-occurrence patterns. Ecology, 81(9): 2606-2621.
[21]	Gotelli N J, Entsminger G L, 2009. Ecosim: null models software for ecology, version 7, Acquired Intelligence Inc. and Kesey-Bear: Jericho, VT, USA. Available at: http:/garyentsminger.com/ecosim.htm.
[22]	Gotelli N J, Ulrich W, 2012. Statistical challenges in null model analysis. Oikos, 121(2): 171-180.
[23]	Gotelli N J, UlrichW, 2010. The empirical Bayes approach as a tool to identify non-random species associations. Oecologia, 162(2): 463-477.
[24]	Gutiérrez-López M, Jesús J B, Trigo D et al., 2010. Relationships among spatial distribution of soil microarthropods, earthworm species and soil properties. Pedobiologia, 53(6): 381-389.
[25]	He Q, Bertness M D, Altieri A H, 2013. Global shifts towards positive species interactions with increasing environmental stress. Ecology Letters, 16(5): 695-706.
[26]	Hortal J, Roura-Pascual N, Sanders N J et al., 2010. Understanding (insect) species distributions across spatial scales. Ecography, 33(1): 51-53.
[27]	Hubbell S P, 2001. The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[28]	Hutchinson G E, 1959. Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals? The American Naturalist, 93(870): 145-159.
[29]	Jiménez J J, Decaëns T, Rossi J, 2012. Soil environmental heterogeneity allows spatial co-occurrence of competitor earthworm species in a gallery forest of the Colombian 'Llanos'. Oikos, 121(6): 915-926.
[30]	John R, Dalling J W, Harms K E, 2007. Soil nutrients influence spatial distributions of tropical tree species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(3): 864-869.
[31]	Kaneda S, Kaneko N, 2002. Influence of soil quality on the growth of Folsomia candida (Willem) (Collembola). Pedobiologia, 46(5): 428-439.
[32]	Legendre P, Borcard D, Blanchet F G et al., 2012. PCNM: MEM spatial eigenfunction and principal coordinate analyses 2.1-2. Available at: http://127.0.0.1:20239/library/PCNM/DESCRIP TION.
[33]	Legendre P, Mi X C, Ren H B et al., 2009. Partitioning beta diversity in a subtropical broad-leaved forest of China. Ecology, 90(3): 663-674.
[34]	Leibold M A, Holyoak M, Mouquet N et al., 2004. The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi-scale community ecology. Ecology Letters, 7(7): 601-613.
[35]	Maraun M, Erdmann G, Fischer B M et al., 2011. Stable isotopes revisited: their use and limits for oribatid mite trophic ecology. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 43(5): 877-882.
[36]	Mayfield M M, Boni M F, Daily G C et al., 2005. Species and functional diversity of native and human-dominated plant communities. Ecology, 86(9): 2365-2372.
[37]	Mayfield M M, Levine J M, 2010. Opposing effects of competitive exclusion on the phylogenetic structure of communities. Ecology Letters, 13(9): 1085-1093.
[38]	Michalet R, Chen S Y, An L Z et al., 2015. Communities: are they groups of hidden interactions? Journal of Vegetation Science, 26(2): 207-218.
[39]	Nachman G, Borregaard M K, 2010. From complex spatial dynamics to simple Markov chain models: do predators and prey leave footprints? Ecography, 33(1): 137-147.
[40]	Nef L, 1960. Comparaison de l'efficacité de différentes variantes de l'appareil de Berlese-Tullgren. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Entomologie, 46(2): 178-199. (in Spanish)
[41]	Ofiteru I D, Lunn M, Curtis T P et al., 2010. Combined niche and neutral effects in a microbial wastewater treatment community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(35): 15345-15350.
[42]	Ojala R, Huhta V, 2001. Dispersal of microarthropods in forest soil. Pedobiologia, 45(5): 443-450.
[43]	Oksanen J, Blanchet F G, Kindt P et al., 2015. Vegan: Community Ecology Package. R package version 2.3-0. Available at: http://cran.ism.ac.jp/web/packages/vegan/vegan.pdf.
[44]	Pianka E R, 1973. The structure of lizard communities. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4(1): 53-74.
[45]	Smith T W, Lundholm J T, 2010. Variation partitioning as a tool to distinguish between niche and neutral processes. Ecography, 33(4): 648-655.
[46]	Straalen van N M, Timmermans M J T N, Roelofs D et al., 2008. Apterygota in the spotlights of ecology, evolution and genomics. European Journal of Soil Biology, 44(5-6): 452-457.
[47]	Ulrich W, 2008. Pairs—a FORTRAN program for studying pair-wise species associations in ecological matrices, Version 1.0. Available at: www.uni.torun.pl/~ulrichw.

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通讯作者: 陈斌, bchen63@163.com

1.
沈阳化工大学材料科学与工程学院沈阳 110142

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Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community

1. Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Monitoring of Geographic Environment, College of Heilongjiang Province, Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150025, China;

2. College of Geographical Science, Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150025, China;

3. Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China

Corresponding author: GAO Meixiang.E-mail:gmx102@163.com; WU Donghui.E-mail:wudonghui@neigae.ac.cn

Received Date: 2015-04-23

Rev Recd Date: 2015-06-07

Publish Date: 2015-05-27

Key words:

Abstract: Understanding the underlying processes of how communities are structured remains a central question in community ecology. However, the mechanisms of the soil animal community are still unclear, especially for communities on a small scale. To evaluate the relative roles of biotic interactions and environmental and spatial processes in a soil collembolan community, a field experiment was carried out on a small scale (50 m) in the farmland ecosystem of the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. In August and October, 2011, we took 100 samples each month in a 50 m × 50 m plot using a spatially delimited sampling design. Variation partitioning was used to quantify the relative contributions of the spatial and environmental variables. A null model was selected to test for the non-randomness pattern of species co-occurrence and body size in assemblages of collembolans and to test whether the pattern observed was the result of environmental or biotic processes that structured the community on a small scale. The results showed that large variance was accounted for by spatial variables (18.99% in August and 21.83% in October, both were significant). There were relatively lower effects of environmental variation (3.56% in August and 1.45% in October, neither was significant), while the soil water content, soil pH and soybean height explained a significant portion of the variance that was observed in the spatial pattern of the collembolan community. Furthermore, the null model revealed more co-occurrence than expected by chance, suggesting that collembolan communities had a non-random co-occurrence pattern in both August and October. Additionally, environmental niche overlap and the body size ratio of co-occurrence showed that interspecific competition was not influential in collembolan community structuring. Considering all of the results together, the contributions of spatial and environmental processes were stronger than biotic interactions in the small-scale structuring of a soil collembolan community.

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Reference (47)

[1]	Albrecht M, Gotelli N J, 2001. Spatial and temporal niche partitioning in grassland ants. Oecologia, 126(1): 134-141.
[2]	Arbea J I, Zumeta J B, 2001. Ecología de los Colémbolos (Hexapoda, Collembola) en Los Monegros (Zaragoza, España). Boletín de la Sociedad Entomologica Aragonesa, (28): 35-48. (in Spanish)
[3]	Bell T, 2010. Experimental tests of the bacterial distance-decay relationship. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 4: 1357-1365.
[4]	Bello F de, Vandewalle M, Reitalu T et al., 2013. Evidence for scale-and disturbance-dependent trait assembly patterns in dry semi-natural grasslands. Journal of Ecology, 101(5): 1237-1244.
[5]	Bertness M D, Callaway R, 1994. Positive interactions in communities. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 9(5): 191-193.
[6]	Borcard D, Legendre P, 2002. All-scale spatial analysis of ecological data by means of principal coordinates of neighbour matrices. Ecological Modelling, 153(1-2): 51-68.
[7]	Borcard D, Legendre P, Avois-Jacquet C et al., 2004. Dissecting the spatial structure of ecological data at multiple scales. Ecology, 85(7): 1826-1832.
[8]	Caruso T, Chan Y, Lacap D C et al., 2011. Stochastic and deterministic processes interact in the assembly of desert microbial communities on a global scale. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 5(9): 1406-1413.
[9]	Caruso T, Trokhymets V, Bargagli R et al., 2013. Biotic interactions as a structuring force in soil communities: evidence from the micro-arthropods of an Antarctic moss model system. Oecologia, 172(2): 495-503.
[10]	Decaëns T, Margerie P, Aubert M et al., 2008. Assembly rules within earthworm communities in north-western France: a regional analysis. Applied Soil Ecology, 39(3): 321-335.
[11]	Diamond J M, 1975. Assembly of Species Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[12]	Dray S, Legendre P, Peres-Neto P R, 2006. Spatial modelling: a comprehensive framework for principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices (PCNM). Ecological Modelling, 196(3-4): 483-493.
[13]	Dumbrell A J, Nelson M, Helgason T et al., 2010. Relative roles of niche and neutral processes in structuring a soil microbial community. The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, 4(3): 337-345.
[14]	Emerson B C, Gillespie R G, 2008. Phylogenetic analysis of community assembly and structure over space and time. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 23(11): 619-630.
[15]	Fahrig L, Merriam G, 1994. Conservation of fragmented populations. Conservation Biology, 8(1): 50-59.
[16]	Fuentes M, 2002. Seed dispersal and tree species diversity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 17(12): 550.
[17]	Gao Meixiang, He Ping, Liu Dong et al, 2014. Relative roles of spatial factors, environmental filtering and biotic interactions in fine-scale structuring of a soil mite community. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 79: 68-77.
[18]	Gao Meixiang, He Ping, Sun Xin et al., 2014. Relative contributions of environmental filtering, biotic interactions and dispersal limitation in a soil collembolan community from a temperate deciduous forest in the Maoer Mountains. Chinese Science Bulletin, 59(24): 2426-2438. (in Chinese)
[19]	Gao Meixiang, Sun Xin, Wu Donghui et al., 2014. Spatial autocorrelation at multi-scale of soil collembolan community in farmland of the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. Acta Ecologica Sinica, 34(17): 4980-4990. (in Chinese)
[20]	Gotelli N J, 2000. Null model analysis of species co-occurrence patterns. Ecology, 81(9): 2606-2621.
[21]	Gotelli N J, Entsminger G L, 2009. Ecosim: null models software for ecology, version 7, Acquired Intelligence Inc. and Kesey-Bear: Jericho, VT, USA. Available at: http:/garyentsminger.com/ecosim.htm.
[22]	Gotelli N J, Ulrich W, 2012. Statistical challenges in null model analysis. Oikos, 121(2): 171-180.
[23]	Gotelli N J, UlrichW, 2010. The empirical Bayes approach as a tool to identify non-random species associations. Oecologia, 162(2): 463-477.
[24]	Gutiérrez-López M, Jesús J B, Trigo D et al., 2010. Relationships among spatial distribution of soil microarthropods, earthworm species and soil properties. Pedobiologia, 53(6): 381-389.
[25]	He Q, Bertness M D, Altieri A H, 2013. Global shifts towards positive species interactions with increasing environmental stress. Ecology Letters, 16(5): 695-706.
[26]	Hortal J, Roura-Pascual N, Sanders N J et al., 2010. Understanding (insect) species distributions across spatial scales. Ecography, 33(1): 51-53.
[27]	Hubbell S P, 2001. The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[28]	Hutchinson G E, 1959. Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals? The American Naturalist, 93(870): 145-159.
[29]	Jiménez J J, Decaëns T, Rossi J, 2012. Soil environmental heterogeneity allows spatial co-occurrence of competitor earthworm species in a gallery forest of the Colombian 'Llanos'. Oikos, 121(6): 915-926.
[30]	John R, Dalling J W, Harms K E, 2007. Soil nutrients influence spatial distributions of tropical tree species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(3): 864-869.
[31]	Kaneda S, Kaneko N, 2002. Influence of soil quality on the growth of Folsomia candida (Willem) (Collembola). Pedobiologia, 46(5): 428-439.
[32]	Legendre P, Borcard D, Blanchet F G et al., 2012. PCNM: MEM spatial eigenfunction and principal coordinate analyses 2.1-2. Available at: http://127.0.0.1:20239/library/PCNM/DESCRIP TION.
[33]	Legendre P, Mi X C, Ren H B et al., 2009. Partitioning beta diversity in a subtropical broad-leaved forest of China. Ecology, 90(3): 663-674.
[34]	Leibold M A, Holyoak M, Mouquet N et al., 2004. The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi-scale community ecology. Ecology Letters, 7(7): 601-613.
[35]	Maraun M, Erdmann G, Fischer B M et al., 2011. Stable isotopes revisited: their use and limits for oribatid mite trophic ecology. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 43(5): 877-882.
[36]	Mayfield M M, Boni M F, Daily G C et al., 2005. Species and functional diversity of native and human-dominated plant communities. Ecology, 86(9): 2365-2372.
[37]	Mayfield M M, Levine J M, 2010. Opposing effects of competitive exclusion on the phylogenetic structure of communities. Ecology Letters, 13(9): 1085-1093.
[38]	Michalet R, Chen S Y, An L Z et al., 2015. Communities: are they groups of hidden interactions? Journal of Vegetation Science, 26(2): 207-218.
[39]	Nachman G, Borregaard M K, 2010. From complex spatial dynamics to simple Markov chain models: do predators and prey leave footprints? Ecography, 33(1): 137-147.
[40]	Nef L, 1960. Comparaison de l'efficacité de différentes variantes de l'appareil de Berlese-Tullgren. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Entomologie, 46(2): 178-199. (in Spanish)
[41]	Ofiteru I D, Lunn M, Curtis T P et al., 2010. Combined niche and neutral effects in a microbial wastewater treatment community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(35): 15345-15350.
[42]	Ojala R, Huhta V, 2001. Dispersal of microarthropods in forest soil. Pedobiologia, 45(5): 443-450.
[43]	Oksanen J, Blanchet F G, Kindt P et al., 2015. Vegan: Community Ecology Package. R package version 2.3-0. Available at: http://cran.ism.ac.jp/web/packages/vegan/vegan.pdf.
[44]	Pianka E R, 1973. The structure of lizard communities. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4(1): 53-74.
[45]	Smith T W, Lundholm J T, 2010. Variation partitioning as a tool to distinguish between niche and neutral processes. Ecography, 33(4): 648-655.
[46]	Straalen van N M, Timmermans M J T N, Roelofs D et al., 2008. Apterygota in the spotlights of ecology, evolution and genomics. European Journal of Soil Biology, 44(5-6): 452-457.
[47]	Ulrich W, 2008. Pairs—a FORTRAN program for studying pair-wise species associations in ecological matrices, Version 1.0. Available at: www.uni.torun.pl/~ulrichw.

Relative Contributions of Spatial and Environmental Processes and Biotic Interactions in a Soil Collembolan Community

doi: 10.1007/s11769-015-0778-6

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References

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