CROWTHERS GARDEN CENTRE ABRIDGE DRIVERS

To assess ecosystem-level effects of different belowground consumers, a number of functional classifications has been suggested for individual taxonomic groups (Gisin, 1943 BouchГ©, 1977 Ferris, Bongers & De Goede, 2001). The magnitude and direction of these effects depend on the particular consumer type and its interactions with other biota and the environment (Bradford et al., 2002 HГ¤ttenschwiler, Tiunov & Scheu, 2005 Eisenhauer, Reich & Isbell, 2012 Coulibaly et al., 2019). This is surprising considering that consumer communities can strongly affect decomposition (GarcГa-Palacios et al., 2013), soil structure (Jones, Lawton & Shachak, 1994), plant nutrition (Bonkowski, 2004) and functional responses of microbial communities (Crowther et al., 2015 Thakur & Geisen, 2019).

CROWTHERS GARDEN CENTRE ABRIDGE DRIVERS

Nevertheless, while soil prokaryotes and fungi are recognised as important drivers of ecosystem functions in biogeochemical models, soil protists and animals are often neglected (Filser et al., 2016 Deckmyn et al., 2020).

Soils host about 50% of global animal biomass (Fierer et al., 2009) and the majority of terrestrial animal biodiversity is associated with soil and litter as a habitat or food source (Table 1). Together, they form the decomposer system responsible for fundamental ecosystem functions such as decomposition of organic matter, nutrient release, soil aggregation and plant growth, and supporting aboveground food webs (Lavelle, 1996 Bardgett, Hopkins & Usher, 2005 Wagg et al., 2014 Steffan & Dharampal, 2018). Soil communities comprise prokaryotes and fungi, which release enzymes into the environment for food digestion, and heterotrophic protists and animals (hereafter termed вЂconsumersвЂ™ for simplicity), which ingest food resources from the environment and digest them inside their body. INTRODUCTION (1) Belowground consumers and ecosystem functioningД«iota play an important and active role in soil, supporting elemental cycles and shaping overall ecological and evolutionary responses of terrestrial ecosystems to environmental changes (Bardgett & van der Putten, 2014 Crowther et al., 2019). The compiled multifunctional classification of soil-associated consumers will serve as a reference for ecologists working with biodiversity changes and biodiversityвЂ“ecosystem functioning relationships, making soil food-web research more accessible and reproducible. Wider adoption of such tools and the development of open interoperable platforms that assemble morphological, ecological and trophic data as traits of soil taxa will enable the refinement and expansion of the multifunctional classification of consumers in soil. Novel methods, such as stable isotope, fatty acid and DNA gut content analyses, have revealed previously hidden facets of trophic relationships of soil consumers, such as food assimilation, multichannel feeding across trophic levels, hidden trophic niche differentiation and the importance of alternative food/prey, as well as energy transfers across ecosystem compartments. In many cases, omnivory is observed down to the species level of taxonomic resolution, challenging realism of traditional soil food-web models based on distinct resource-based energy channels. Our summary highlights various strands of evidence that many functional groups commonly used in soil ecology and food-web models are feeding on multiple types of food resources. We have integrated existing functional group classifications with findings gained with novel methods and compiled an overarching classification across taxa focusing on key universal traits such as food resource preferences, body masses, microhabitat specialisation, protection and hunting mechanisms. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of the feeding habits of consumers in soil, including protists, micro-, meso- and macrofauna (invertebrates), and soil-associated vertebrates.

Over the last two decades, molecular, biochemical and isotopic tools have improved our understanding of the feeding habits of various soil organisms, yet this knowledge is still to be synthesised into a common functional framework. Simultaneous assessment of the functional roles of multiple taxa is possible using food-web reconstructions, but our knowledge of the feeding habits of many taxa is insufficient and often based on limited evidence. Soil ecologists often operate with functional groups to infer the effects of individual taxa on ecosystem functions and services. Soil organisms drive major ecosystem functions by mineralising carbon and releasing nutrients during decomposition processes, which supports plant growth, aboveground biodiversity and, ultimately, human nutrition.

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