Authors
Johan Van Den Hoogen, Stefan Geisen, Devin Routh, Howard Ferris, Walter Traunspurger, David A Wardle, Ron GM De Goede, Byron J Adams, Wasim Ahmad, Walter S Andriuzzi, Richard D Bardgett, Michael Bonkowski, Raquel Campos-Herrera, Juvenil E Cares, Tancredi Caruso, Larissa de Brito Caixeta, Xiaoyun Chen, Sofia R Costa, Rachel Creamer, José Mauro da Cunha Castro, Marie Dam, Djibril Djigal, Miguel Escuer, Bryan S Griffiths, Carmen Gutiérrez, Karin Hohberg, Daria Kalinkina, Paul Kardol, Alan Kergunteuil, Gerard Korthals, Valentyna Krashevska, Alexey A Kudrin, Qi Li, Wenju Liang, Matthew Magilton, Mariette Marais, José Antonio Rodríguez Martín, Elizaveta Matveeva, El Hassan Mayad, Christian Mulder, Peter Mullin, Roy Neilson, TA Nguyen, Uffe N Nielsen, Hiroaki Okada, Juan Emilio Palomares Rius, Kaiwen Pan, Vlada Peneva, Loïc Pellissier, Julio Carlos Pereira da Silva, Camille Pitteloud, Thomas O Powers, Kirsten Powers, Casper W Quist, Sergio Rasmann, Sara Sánchez Moreno, Stefan Scheu, Heikki Setälä, Anna Sushchuk, Alexei V Tiunov, Jean Trap, Wim van der Putten, Mette Vestergård, Cecile Villenave, Lieven Waeyenberge, Diana H Wall, Rutger Wilschut, Daniel G Wright, Jiue-in Yang, Thomas Ward Crowther
Publication date
2019/8
Journal
Nature
Volume
572
Issue
7768
Pages
194-198
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Description
Soil organisms are a crucial part of the terrestrial biosphere. Despite their importance for ecosystem functioning, few quantitative, spatially explicit models of the active belowground community currently exist. In particular, nematodes are the most abundant animals on Earth, filling all trophic levels in the soil food web. Here we use 6,759 georeferenced samples to generate a mechanistic understanding of the patterns of the global abundance of nematodes in the soil and the composition of their functional groups. The resulting maps show that 4.4±0.64× 10 20 nematodes (with a total biomass of approximately 0.3 gigatonnes) inhabit surface soils across the world, with higher abundances in sub-Arctic regions (38% of total) than in temperate (24%) or tropical (21%) regions. Regional variations in these global trends also provide insights into local patterns of soil fertility and functioning. These high-resolution models …
Scholar articles
J Van Den Hoogen, S Geisen, D Routh, H Ferris… - Nature, 2019