Environmental conditions modulate warming effects on plant litter decomposition globally

Empirical studies worldwide show that warming has variable effects on plant litter decomposition, leaving the overall impact of climate change on decomposition uncertain. We conducted a meta-analysis of 109 experimental warming studies across seven continents, using natural and standardised plant material, to assess the overarching effect of warming on litter decomposition and identify potential moderating factors. We determined that at least 5.2 degrees of warming is required for a significant increase in decomposition. Overall, warming did not have a significant effect on decomposition at a global scale. However, we found that warming reduced decomposition in warmer, low-moisture areas, while it slightly increased decomposition in colder regions, although this increase was not significant. This is particularly relevant given the past decade's global warming trend at higher latitudes where a large proportion of terrestrial carbon is stored. Future changes in vegetation towards plants ..., Literature data on natural plant litter decomposition
We conducted an extensive literature survey for peer-reviewed publications in the ISI Web of Science database (http://apps.webofknowledge.com/) on September 1st 2023. We used (warming OR heat* OR OTC OR open top chamber*) AND (litter* OR litter bag) AND (decomposition OR mass loss) as search criteria, which returned 1184 studies (Figure S1). We considered terrestrial field studies that compared litter decomposition (mass loss and decomposition rate) under  experimentally increased temperatures (methods found in our search were open-top chambers, heating cables, infrared heaters, sunlit controlled-environment chambers, UVB filter films, open-topped polythene tents, and closed-top chambers) and ambient conditions. From the 60 studies that met our criteria, we extracted mean values, sample sizes and measures of variation (i.e., standard errors or standard deviations) for decomposition (i.e., decomposition rates, absolute and relative ma..., , # Environmental conditions modulate warming effects on plant litter decomposition globally

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p5hqbzkw5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p5hqbzkw5)

#### title: \"README\_EcolLet\_Schwieger\_et\_al\" author: \"Sarah Schwieger\" date: \"2024-11-08\" output: html\_document

This dataset and R codes correspond to the manuscript: \"Macro-environment strongly interacts with warming in a global analysis of decomposition\" of Schwieger et al.

## Description of the data and file structure

* \"df1_meta_analysis_data.csv\": Data containing the extracted metadata of the literature data on natural plant litter decomposition and the standardised plant litter data from the open-top chamber warming experiments. The file contains the extracted variables reported from the studies as described in the \"Data collection\" section (see Methods), as well as the map-based data described in the \"Explanatory macro-environmental drivers\" section and Supplementary Table S3 (see Methods).
* This...