Data from: Disentangling the drivers of ground-dwelling macro-arthropod metacommunity structure at two different spatial scales

The goal of this study was to explore the community assembly rules at local and regional scales.

Site description

All sampling locations were selected within the black soil region (Fig. 1), which is predominantly located in the temperate continental monsoon climatic zone in North China. It is characterized by a dry and cold winter and warm and humid summer. The soil was classified as black soil following the Chinese Soil Classification System, which is equivalent to a Typic Hapludoll in the USDA Soil Taxonomy. More specific details for this soil (such as black soil coverage area, geographical and ecological resources, etc.) can be obtained from Wen and Liang (2001). Samples were collected from three municipal districts: Bei'an, Hulan and Dehui.

Sampling design and setup

We conducted field sampling of ground-dwelling macro-arthropods and measured a set of environmental and spatial variables across all sampling locations three times: in May, July and September 2015. In total, 15 plots (five plots in each of the three municipal districts) were selected and sampled. At each plot, we further selected five sampling sites (approximately 10 m away from each other).

We collected additional samples for estimating soil abiotic parameters at each site. Soil samples (5 × 5 cm and 10 cm depth) were collected near each pitfall trap site. The exact geographic coordinates of each sampling site were obtained by GPS.

Ground-dwelling macro-arthropods were sampled by a pitfall trapping method. For pitfall traps, we used plastic cups (7 cm in diameter and 12 cm deep), which were partially filled with saturated salt water. The traps were exposed for one week in each sampling month. All collected ground-dwelling macro-arthropods were removed from the pitfall traps, sorted and preserved in a 95% alcohol solution. All adult macroarthropods from pitfalls were identified at the species or genus level using appropriate keys (e.g., Simon (1879), Martens (1978) and Barrientos (2004) for Opiliones; Roberts (1993, 1995) for Lycosidae; and Forel and Leplat (2001) and Ortuño and Marcos (2003) for Carabidae) and then were counted. Juvenile ground-dwelling arthropods were excluded from all analyses due to difficulties with their identification (Gao et al., 2016).

Environmental and spatial variables

Environmental variables used in our analysis included soil organic matter, soil total nitrogen, water content, pH, temperature. Soil water content (SWC%) was measured in the laboratory after the fresh soil was loaded into an aluminium box. Prior to estimating soil total nitrogen (TN) (Kjeldahl's method described by Duchaufour (1975)), soil organic matter (SOM) (Anne's method described by Duchaufour (1975)) and pH (Pansu and Gautheyrou, 2003), the collected soil samples were air-dried at 25℃ for one week and sieved (1 mm mesh size). Local temperature values were obtained from the publicly available datasets (The Local Chronicles of Bei’an, Hulan and Dehui). Geographic coordinates were recorded for further spatial modelling analysis.

We have seven data files:

env BAHLDH may.csv

env BAHLDH july.csv

env BAHLDH september.csv

sp BAHLDH may.csv

sp BAHLDH july.csv

sp BAHLDH september.csv

Geospatial coordinates.csv

Explanation of the variables in the datasets:

Site: Bei’an, Hulan, Dehui represent sampling district; I-V represent sampling plot; 1-5 represent replicate

SOM: soil organic matter

pH: soil pH

SWC: Soil water content

TN: soil total nitrogen