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Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits

Windstorms and salvage logging lead to huge soil disturbance in alpine spruce forests, potentially affecting soil-living arthropods. However, the impacts of forest loss and possible interactions with underlying ecological gradients on soil microarthropod communities remain little known, especially a...

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Autores principales: Nardi, Davide, Fontaneto, Diego, Girardi, Matteo, Chini, Isaac, Bertoldi, Daniela, Larcher, Roberto, Vernesi, Cristiano
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10560493/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37814629
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15959
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author Nardi, Davide
Fontaneto, Diego
Girardi, Matteo
Chini, Isaac
Bertoldi, Daniela
Larcher, Roberto
Vernesi, Cristiano
author_facet Nardi, Davide
Fontaneto, Diego
Girardi, Matteo
Chini, Isaac
Bertoldi, Daniela
Larcher, Roberto
Vernesi, Cristiano
author_sort Nardi, Davide
collection PubMed
description Windstorms and salvage logging lead to huge soil disturbance in alpine spruce forests, potentially affecting soil-living arthropods. However, the impacts of forest loss and possible interactions with underlying ecological gradients on soil microarthropod communities remain little known, especially across different environmental conditions. Here we used DNA metabarcoding approach to study wind-induced disturbances on forest communities of springtails and soil mites. In particular, we aimed to test the effect of forest soil disturbance on the abundance, richness, species composition, and functional guilds of microarthropods. We sampled 29 pairs of windfall-forest sites across gradients of elevation, precipitation, aspect and slope, 2 years after a massive windstorm, named Vaia, which hit North-Eastern Italy in October 2018. Our results showed that wind-induced disturbances led to detrimental impacts on soil-living communities. Abundance of microarthropods decreased in windfalls, but with interacting effects with precipitation gradients. Operative Taxonomic Units (OTU) richness strongly decreased in post-disturbance sites, particularly affecting plant-feeder trophic guilds. Furthermore, species composition analyses revealed that communities occurring in post-disturbance sites were different to those in undisturbed forests (i.e., stands without wind damage). However, variables at different spatial scales played different roles depending on the considered taxon. Our study contributes to shed light on the impacts on important, but often neglected arthropod communities after windstorm in spruce forests. Effects of forest disturbance are often mediated by underlying large scale ecological gradients, such as precipitation and topography. Massive impacts of stronger and more frequent windstorms are expected to hit forests in the future; given the response we recorded, mediated by environmental features, forest managers need to take site-specific conservation measures.
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spelling pubmed-105604932023-10-09 Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits Nardi, Davide Fontaneto, Diego Girardi, Matteo Chini, Isaac Bertoldi, Daniela Larcher, Roberto Vernesi, Cristiano PeerJ Biodiversity Windstorms and salvage logging lead to huge soil disturbance in alpine spruce forests, potentially affecting soil-living arthropods. However, the impacts of forest loss and possible interactions with underlying ecological gradients on soil microarthropod communities remain little known, especially across different environmental conditions. Here we used DNA metabarcoding approach to study wind-induced disturbances on forest communities of springtails and soil mites. In particular, we aimed to test the effect of forest soil disturbance on the abundance, richness, species composition, and functional guilds of microarthropods. We sampled 29 pairs of windfall-forest sites across gradients of elevation, precipitation, aspect and slope, 2 years after a massive windstorm, named Vaia, which hit North-Eastern Italy in October 2018. Our results showed that wind-induced disturbances led to detrimental impacts on soil-living communities. Abundance of microarthropods decreased in windfalls, but with interacting effects with precipitation gradients. Operative Taxonomic Units (OTU) richness strongly decreased in post-disturbance sites, particularly affecting plant-feeder trophic guilds. Furthermore, species composition analyses revealed that communities occurring in post-disturbance sites were different to those in undisturbed forests (i.e., stands without wind damage). However, variables at different spatial scales played different roles depending on the considered taxon. Our study contributes to shed light on the impacts on important, but often neglected arthropod communities after windstorm in spruce forests. Effects of forest disturbance are often mediated by underlying large scale ecological gradients, such as precipitation and topography. Massive impacts of stronger and more frequent windstorms are expected to hit forests in the future; given the response we recorded, mediated by environmental features, forest managers need to take site-specific conservation measures. PeerJ Inc. 2023-10-05 /pmc/articles/PMC10560493/ /pubmed/37814629 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15959 Text en © 2023 Nardi et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biodiversity
Nardi, Davide
Fontaneto, Diego
Girardi, Matteo
Chini, Isaac
Bertoldi, Daniela
Larcher, Roberto
Vernesi, Cristiano
Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title_full Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title_fullStr Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title_full_unstemmed Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title_short Impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
title_sort impact of forest disturbance on microarthropod communities depends on underlying ecological gradients and species traits
topic Biodiversity
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10560493/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37814629
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15959
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