Nematode community shifts in response to experimental warming and canopy conditions are associated with plant community changes in the temperate-boreal forest ecotone.

Global climate warming is one of the key forces driving plant community shifts, such as range shifts of temperate species into boreal forests. As plant community shifts are slow to observe, ecotones, boundaries between two ecosystems, are target areas for providing early evidence of ecological responses to warming. The role of soil fauna is poorly explored in ecotones, although their positive and negative effects on plant species can influence plant community structure.

Plant diversity effects on soil food webs are stronger than those of elevated CO2 and N deposition in a long-term grassland experiment.

Recent metaanalyses suggest biodiversity loss affects the functioning of ecosystems to a similar extent as other global environmental change agents. However, the abundance and functioning of soil organisms have been hypothesized to be much less responsive to such changes, particularly in plant diversity, than aboveground variables, although tests of this hypothesis are extremely rare. We examined the responses of soil food webs (soil microorganisms, nematodes, microarthropods) to 13-y manipulation of multiple environmental factors that are changing at global scales--specifically plant species richness, atmospheric CO2, and N deposition--in a grassland experiment in Minnesota.