title: Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity across Europe.
abstract: Soil biodiversity plays a key role in regulating the processes that underpin the delivery of ecosystem goods and services in terrestrial ecosystems. Agricultural intensification is known to change the diversity of individual groups of soil biota, but less is known about how intensification affects biodiversity of the soil food web as a whole, and whether or not these effects may be generalized across regions. We examined biodiversity in soil food webs from grasslands, extensive, and intensive rotations in four agricultural regions across Europe: in Sweden, the UK, the Czech Republic and Greece. Effects of land-use intensity were quantified based on structure and diversity among functional groups in the soil food web, as well as on community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. We also elucidate land-use intensity effects on diversity of taxonomic units within taxonomic groups of soil fauna. We found that between regions soil food web diversity measures were variable, but that increasing land-use intensity caused highly consistent responses. In particular, land-use intensification reduced the complexity in the soil food webs, as well as the community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. In all regions across Europe, species richness of earthworms, Collembolans, and oribatid mites was negatively affected by increased land-use intensity. The taxonomic distinctness, which is a measure of taxonomic relatedness of species in a community that is independent of species richness, was also reduced by land-use intensification. We conclude that intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity, making soil food webs less diverse and composed of smaller bodied organisms. Land-use intensification results in fewer functional groups of soil biota with fewer and taxonomically more closely related species. We discuss how these changes in soil biodiversity due to land-use intensification may threaten the functioning of soil in agricultural production systems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, 54124, Greece.
authors.forename: Maria A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Tsiafouli
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Thébault
authors.forename: Stefanos P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Sgardelis
authors.forename: Peter C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: de Ruiter
authors.forename: Wim H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: van der Putten
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Birkhofer
authors.forename: Lia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hemerik
authors.forename: Franciska T
authors.initials: FT
authors.lastname: de Vries
authors.forename: Richard D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Bardgett
authors.forename: Mark Vincent
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Brady
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bjornlund
authors.forename: Helene Bracht
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Jørgensen
authors.forename: Sören
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Christensen
authors.forename: Tina D'
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Hertefeldt
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hotes
authors.forename: W H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Gera Hol
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Frouz
authors.forename: Mira
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Liiri
authors.forename: Simon R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Mortimer
authors.forename: Heikki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Setälä
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tzanopoulos
authors.forename: Karoline
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Uteseny
authors.forename: Václav
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pižl
authors.forename: Josef
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stary
authors.forename: Volkmar
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Wolters
authors.forename: Katarina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hedlund
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D044822:Biodiversity; D005060:Europe; D012988:Soil Microbiology
keywords: agricultural intensification; body mass; ecosystem services; functional groups; soil food web; taxonomic breadth; taxonomic distinctness; terrestrial ecosystems