No home-field advantage in litter decomposition from the desert to temperate forest

1. Litter decomposition rates are determined by the interplay of climate, decomposer organisms and litter quality. It has been suggested that the decomposer community may be locally adapted to litter quality, providing a home-field advantage (HFA) resulting in accelerated decomposition of local compared to non-local litter, after accounting for decomposition differences due to litter quality and the functional capacity of microorganisms. Although widely tested in forests, this hypothesis remains controversial and lacks a general support of its generality across climates.
2. We therefore tested the HFA hypothesis for litter decomposition in four contrasting ecosystems along an extensive climatic gradient in Chile, using a translocation experiment involving litter from 20 species. In addition to comparing mass loss, we adopted a novel way to disentangle decomposer effects from climate effects, based on loss rates of elements that are actively released from the litter by decomposers during..., General description
The dataset is related to the publication “No home-field advantage in litter decomposition from the desert to temperate forest”, by van den Brink et al. 2023 in Functional Ecology. The study aimed at testing the home-field advantage hypothesis in litter decomposition along a climate gradient in Chile. Thus, the dataset comprises litter mass loss data from a translocation experiment with 20 litter species from four study sites (arid, semi-arid, Mediterranean and temperate), where each species was set to decompose in each of the study sites. In addition, the study used the ratios nitrogen to potassium loss (N/K loss) and phosphorus to potassium loss (P/K loss) to account for microbial breakdown (N and P loss) vs. physical leaching (K loss). Therefore, the dataset also contains the nutrient ratios for each mass loss data.
The data of mass loss, N/K and P/K loss were used to calculate the litter ability, soil community ability and home-field effect according to the model...,