soil multifunctinality

The patterns and drivers of soil multifunctionality during primary succession in glacier retreats were examined on a 120-years old Hailuogou Glacier Chronosequence. Bacteria and fungi sequencing was performed using the Illumina MiSeq PE300 platform; nematodes were extracted and identified to the genus level using an inverted compound microscope. Multitrophic diversity was calculated using the richness of individual groups of soil organisms after z-score transformations. To calculate the ecosystem multifunctionality, fourteen ecosystem functions were selected and assessed with both averaging and threshold approaches. To determine elemental flux, potential activities of five extracellular soil enzymes were assayed and grouped into C fluxes (BG and CBH), N fluxes (LAP and NAG) and P fluxes (AP). To determine community energy fluxes, nematode food web topology was assessed including fresh biomass of each nematode group, their feeding preferences, and community density. Food web coupling for multi-kingdom groups—plant, bacteria, fungi, bacterivorous nematodes, fungivorous nematodes, herbivorous nematodes, omnivorous and predatory nematodes—were constructed as the average coefficient of pairwise Spearman’s rank correlations, and visualized using Cytoscape. Structural equation modeling was conducted to analyze hypothetical pathways regarding how chronosequence impacted the ecosystem multifunctionality.