Diversity and trophic structure of soil communities under climate change

This document represents the deliverable D3.3 released by the EJP SOIL internal project ‘MINOTAUR’ about the diversity and trophic structure of soil communities under climate change, based on the analysis of simple or composite bioindicator. Using collected data in MINOTAUR project from LTE field campaign and additional literature review data, the objectives of this document are i) to present different biological simple indicators and composite indicators, selected with the aim to better link soil biodiversity to associated soil functions and ecosystem service provisioning, and ii) to assess their response to climate change. The evaluation of the impact of climate change on soil communities, characterized by diversity or trophic structure, is possible by assessing the distribution of species that are likely to adapt to the changes in temperature and precipitations predicted by climate change scenarios. However, this approach has a number of weaknesses, mainly due to the mosaic pattern of land use. Another way to assess the effect of climate change on soil organisms, is to mobilize data, but this requires access to long chronosequences of data which is rare. In this document, results include i) three composite indicators (EI, QBS-ar, QBS-e) and one simple indicator (earthworm), and their answers in the different climate contexts from the MINOTAUR’s LTE, ii) the response of earthworm community (abundance, biomass, diversity) at European level covering different climate contexts. The analysis of the composite indicators demonstrated i) the massive impact of land management rather than climate (precipitation, temperature) in the community structuration and by consequences on soil functions, ii) the complementarity of biological indicators to reflect environmental pressures and by consequence the necessity to integrate these different bioindicators, linked to different functions, in soil health assessment. The analysis of earthworm community (abundance, biomass, diversity) at European level reinforced the strong effect of soil properties and land use in earthworm community structuration, while demonstrating some sensitivity of earthworm abundance to climatic factors (precipitation and temperature). While the MINOTAUR project is closing to date, it is the ambition of the authors to publish the results of some part of this study in a peer-reviewed journal. As such publication would appear under its own DOI, the raw data used in the analyses will be published as supplementary information in the journal, and to avoid further duplication are not available in association to this Zenodo deposited document. When published, the DOI of the paper will be provided here in an update.