Functional traits of soil nematodes define their response to nitrogen fertilization

1. Nitrogen (N) fertilization and warming are two crucial global change factors affecting the soil nematode communities. The effects of N fertilization and warming, however, on nematode communities in soils are inconsistent across ecosystems and maybe be even opposite.
2. One key reason is that the commonly used taxonomic diversity is less sensitive to environmental changes than the seldom-used trait-based indicators. To verify this, we performed an eight-year field experiment with four N fertilization levels with and without soil warming and collected an extensive dataset consisting of (i) six traits related to the nematode performance, i.e., body size, maximum body length, maximum body width, stylet length, esophagus length, and intestinal length; (ii) the taxonomic alpha (richness and abundance) and beta-diversity (Bray-Curtis dissimilarities) of the whole nematode community and each nematode functional group, (iii) soil food web resources (the total taxonomic richness and abundance ..., ,