Decoupled responses of plants and soil biota to global change across the world’s land ecosystems

Understanding the concurrent responses of aboveground and belowground compartments to global changes is crucial for the maintenance of ecosystem functions and biodiversity conservation. We conducted a comprehensive analysis synthesizing data from 13,209 single observations and 3,223 pairwise observations from 1,166 publications globally to examine the responses of plants and soil organisms and their synchronization. We found that global change factors (GCFs) generally promoted aboveground plant biomass but decreased plant species diversity. In comparison, the responses of belowground soil biota to GCFs were more variable and harder to predict. The analysis of the paired aboveground and belowground observations demonstrated that responses of plants and soil organisms to GCFs are decoupled among diverse groups of soil organisms for different biomes. Our study highlights the importance of integrative research on the aboveground-belowground system for improving predictions regarding the con..., , , The datasets analysed during the current study are available in the DRYAD repository( DOI: 10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rc23).

Description of repository:

This repository contains all of the code and data used to assess Decoupled responses of aboveground plants and soil biota to global change.
All data and analyses mentioned in this study were conducted in R 4.0.5 (R core team 2019).

The datafile contains the following files:

Seven datasets:
above_biomass.csv Metadata for aboveground plant biomass.
above_diversity.csv Metadata for aboveground plant diversity.
below_root_biomass.csv Metadata for belowground plant biomass.
below_biomass.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota biomass.
below_diversity.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota diversity.
below_abundance.csv Metadata for belowground soil biota abundance.
data.csv Metadata for both aboveground plant and belowground soil biota attributes.

All variables in the datasets:
Field Description
Serial Number of the publication in our datas...