S. Scheu

University of Göttingen | GAUG

Nitrogen (N) is essential for net primary production, with much of the required N in terrestrial ecosystems derived from recycling via litter decomposition. The diversity and identity of plant species and decomposer organisms affect N cycling during litter decomposition, yet the generality and magnitude of these effects remain uncertain. To fill th...

Biodiversity experiments revealed that plant diversity loss can decrease ecosystem functions across trophic levels. To address why such biodiversity-function relationships strengthen over time, we established experimental mesocosms replicating a gradient in plant species richness across treatments of shared versus non-shared history of (1) the plan...

The introduction of non‐native tree species has become a global concern and may disrupt native communities and related ecosystem functions. Soil food webs regulate organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling in forests with their feeding activities, but evaluating consequences of the introduction of tree species on soil invertebrates is chall...

Enriching tree species–poor and less productive forests by introducing economically valuable species is a strategy proposed for achieving multipurpose forest management. However, empirical evidence from managed and mature forests on the impact of this enrichment on ecological (multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality) and economic dimensions...

More than half of all life on Earth lives belowground and regulates a wide range of ecosystem functions via their diverse trophic interactions. However, information on how trophic diversity of soil animals varies across functional groups and major environmental gradients is lacking. Here, we use stable isotope analysis (13C/12C and 15N/14N ratios)...

Aim Significant progress has been made in understanding the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in both experimental and real-world ecosystems. Yet, we have limited understanding to which extent biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning in natural heterogeneous environments and whether changes in ecosystem functions are related to...

The ongoing climate change calls for managing forest ecosystems in temperate regions toward more drought‐resistant and climate‐resilient stands. Yet ecological consequences of management options such as planting non‐native tree species and mixing coniferous and deciduous tree species have been little studied, especially on soil animal communities,...

A reliable phylogeny is crucial for understanding the evolution and radiation of animal taxa. Phylogenies based on morphological data may be misleading due to frequent convergent evolution of traits—a problem from which molecular phylogenies suffer less. This may be particularly relevant in oribatid mites, an ancient soil animal taxon with more tha...

Springtails (Collembola) are important members of the soil mesofauna. They are small, often less than 1–2 mm in length. A typical escape response of most surface-living species is to jump, using their furca. However, some species also use chemical defence against predators. While the defence chemistry of higher insects has been well studied, report...

Diversity and community composition of earthworms, key drivers of ecosystem functions, are increasingly threatened by global change, including climate and land-use change. However, empirical evidence for interactions of these concurrent drivers in affecting earthworm communities is scarce. Here, we investigated the effects of an experimentally impo...

Large tropical trees are rightly perceived as supporting a plethora of organisms. However, baseline data about the variety of taxa coexisting on single large tropical trees are lacking and prevent a full understanding of both the magnitude of biodiversity and the complexity of interactions among organisms in tropical rainforests. The two main aims...

Soils, just like all other ecosystem compartments, change over time and, consequently, conditions for soil‐inhabiting organisms are also changing, affecting their composition and diversity. Soil biodiversity is a critical component of ecosystems that supports many essential ecosystem functions and services, such as nutrient cycling, carbon sequestr...

The extraradical mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi is among the major carbon pools in soil that is hard to quantitatively assess in-situ. Established method of in-growth mesh bags in temperate ecosystems is difficult to apply in the tropics, where mesh bags are often damaged by termites. Here we introduce a modification of the in-growth mesh bag techni...

Spiders are excellent predators of considerable ecological importance, consuming roughly half a billion tons of animal prey annually worldwide. Some are also great architects, constructing elaborate capture webs dozens of times their size. Despite that, research about biodiversity, biology, and behavior of spiders is still lagging behind, especiall...

Aim Understanding the worldwide distribution of species has fascinated scientists at least since Alfred Russel Wallace. Global patterns of belowground biodiversity may fundamentally differ from those of aboveground organisms. Here, we examine the global pattern and potential mechanisms driving the endemism and overlap of a soil microarthropod taxon...

Belowground invertebrate communities are dominated by species-rich and very small microarthropods that require long handling times and high taxonomic expertise for species determination. Molecular based methods like metabarcoding circumvent the morphological determination process by assigning taxa bioinformatically based on sequence information. Th...

Humans have substantially transformed the global land surface, resulting in the decline in variation in biotic communities across scales, a phenomenon known as “biological homogenization.” However, different biota are affected by biological homogenization to varying degrees, but this variation and the underlying mechanisms remain little studied, pa...

Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the univ...

The relationship of plant diversity and several ecosystem functions strengthens over time. This suggests that the restructuring of biotic interactions in the process of a community’s assembly and the associated changes in function differ between species-rich and species-poor communities. An important component of these changes is the feedback betwe...

Although species are central units for biological research, recent findings in genomics are raising awareness that what we call species can be ill-founded entities due to solely morphology-based, regional species descriptions. This particularly applies to groups characterized by intricate evolutionary processes such as hybridization, polyploidy, or...

Biodiversity and biomass of aboveground arthropods in central European forests continuously declined during the last decade. However, whether belowground microarthropod communities follow similar patterns has not been investigated. In this study, we compared the abundance, diversity, community composition, stability and asynchrony of oribatid mites...

Biodiversity loss and its potential threat on ecosystem functions call for a critical evaluation of human impacts on forest ecosystems. Management practices based on stand diversification offer a possible solution to biodiversity loss due to monoculture plantations, and these practices often involve planting introduced tree species. Although introd...

Springtails (Collembola), tiny hexapod arthropods, are abundant in the soil of most ecosystems, but our knowledge of their secondary metabolites is limited, in contrast to that of insects. In insects, the outer cuticle is usually covered by mixtures of long-chain hydrocarbons serving different functions, such as water regulation or chemical communi...

Forest soils are a critical component of terrestrial ecosystems and host a large number of animal decomposer species. One diverse and abundant decomposer taxon is oribatid mites (Acari: Oribatida), whose species composition varies with forest type and tree species composition. We used functional traits that indicate different niche dimensions, to i...

Lignocellulose is a major component of vascular plant biomass. Its decomposition is crucial for the terrestrial carbon cycle. Microorganisms are considered primary decomposers, but evidence increases that some invertebrates may also decompose lignocellulose. We investigated the taxonomic distribution and evolutionary origins of GH45 hydrolases, imp...

Most forests in Central Europe are subject to human management, especially timber harvesting, which alters soil conditions by creating gaps in the forest canopy and reduces the availability of deadwood. However, consequences of these management practices, in particular the combined effect of gap formation and deadwood removal, have been largely neg...

The expansion of the oil palm industry in Indonesia has improved livelihoods in rural communities, but comes at the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation. Here, we investigated ways to balance ecological and economic outcomes of oil palm cultivation. We compared a wide range of production systems, including smallholder plantations, industr...

Soil food webs rely on both brown and green energy, i.e., litter material and root-derived resources such as exudates. Earthworms have traditionally been viewed as macro-detritivores fuelled by brown energy and playing a central role in nutrient cycling and belowground energy flux. However, the role of root-derived resources for earthworm nutrition...

Rainforest conversion and expansion of plantations in tropical regions change local microclimate and are associated with biodiversity decline. Tropical soils are a hotspot of animal biodiversity and may sensitively respond to microclimate changes, but these responses remain unexplored. To address this knowledge gap, here we investigated seasonal fl...

Maintaining a balance between growth needs and available food resources is critical to the development of any organism. Ecological stoichiometry provides a theoretical basis for studying stoichiometric mismatches between organisms and their food resources. Recent studies have shown that detritivore taxa occupying different multidimensional stoichio...

Introduction High-throughput sequencing (HTS) provides an efficient and cost-effective way to generate large amounts of sequence data, providing a very powerful tool to analyze biodiversity of soil organisms. However, marker-based methods and the resulting datasets come with a range of challenges and disputes, including incomplete reference databas...

Four new species of trachelid spiders belonging to the genus Utivarachna Kishida, 1940 are described: U. angsoduo sp. nov., U. balonku sp. nov., U. rimba sp. nov., and U. trisula sp. nov. Part of the EFForTS project, the spider specimens were uncovered in a canopy fogging collection of tree crown arthropods along a land-use gradient from rainforest...

Tropical soil microorganisms are major recyclers of the biosphere organic carbon. However, the link of tropical microorganisms to the two main pathways of how carbon enters the belowground system, i.e., plant roots and leaf litter, is poorly understood. To investigate the relative importance of these pathways, we studied the response of microorgani...

Biodiversity is declining on a global scale with detrimental effects on ecosystem functioning. Effects of reduced tree diversity on the diversity of aboveground animals have been studied in detail, whereas the response of soil animals remains poorly understood. We analyzed seasonal variations of soil oribatid mite communities as major soil detritiv...

Terrestrial animal biodiversity is increasingly being lost because of land-use change1,2. However, functional and energetic consequences aboveground and belowground and across trophic levels in megadiverse tropical ecosystems remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, we assessed changes in energy fluxes across ‘green’ aboveground (canopy arthropods...

Exploring species and their functional diversity is of fundamental importance in biology and ecology. Many earthworm species comprise a wide range of genetic lineages/cryptic species, but it remains unclear whether these lineages/cryptic species represent distinct ecological entities that differ in traits. We barcoded 280 individuals of the earthwo...

High-throughput sequencing (HTS) provides an efficient and cost-effective way to generate large amounts of sequence data. However, marker-based methods and the resulting datasets come with a range of challenges and disputes, including incomplete reference databases, controversial sequence similarity thresholds for delineating taxa, and downstream c...

Animal stoichiometry affects fundamental processes ranging from organismal physiology to global element cycles. However, it is unknown whether animal stoichiometry follows predictable scaling relationships with body mass and whether adaptation to life on land or water constrains patterns of elemental allocation. To test both interspecific and intra...

Climate change will likely increase habitat loss of endemic tree species and drives forest conversion in mountainous forests. Elevation gradients provide the opportunity to predict possible consequences of such changes. While species compositions of various taxa have been investigated along elevation gradients, data on trophic changes in soil-dwell...

Mountain forests are at risk as the consequences of climate change will likely lead to altered tree species boundaries. Characterizing food webs along elevation gradients in primary forests may help to predict the potential consequences of such changes, for example with regard to the decomposition of dead organic matter. Here, for the first time, w...

Springtails (Collembola) inhabit soils from the Arctic to the Antarctic and comprise an estimated ~32% of all terrestrial arthropods on Earth. Here, we present a global, spatially-explicit database on springtail communities that includes 249,912 occurrences from 44,999 samples and 2,990 sites. These data are mainly raw sample-level records at the s...

Investigating functional facets of biodiversity across elevation gradients provides the perspective to deepen understanding of the response of communities to global changes. Functional ecology approaches typically assume that filtering of traits across broad environmental gradients is largely due to species turnover rather than intraspecific trait...

Plant mixtures typically lead to higher productivity compared to monocultures. Yet, most studies on plant mixtures focus on aboveground interactions, while little attention is given to interactions below the ground. Earthworms are key components of the belowground subsystem and are closely associated with plant roots; however, how different earthwo...

Evolution optimizes the performance of living organisms through budgeting of limited resources, leading to life-history trade-offs. Many life-history traits are related to body size with larger species typically exhibiting a slower pace of life and lower fecundity. However, soil-living organisms may exhibit size-independent life-history strategies...

Trophic interactions between soil-living organisms occur largely in soil pores and are essential for soil functioning. As soil is a three-dimensional environment where resources are distributed in pores of contrasting size, and higher trophic level consumers (grazers) are typically larger than their microbial food sources, the location of microbial...

Plant nutrient uptake and productivity are driven by a multitude of factors that have been modified by human activities, like climate change and the activity of decomposers. However, interactive effects of climate change and key decomposer groups like earthworms have rarely been studied. In a field microcosm experiment, we investigated the effects...

Carbon allocation of trees to ectomycorrhizas is thought to shape forest nutrient cycling, but the sink activities of different fungal taxa for host resources are unknown. Here, we investigate fungal taxon-specific differences in naturally composed ectomycorrhizal (EM) communities for plant-derived carbon and nitrogen. After aboveground dual labeli...

Molecular gut content analysis via diagnostic PCR or high-throughput sequencing (metabarcoding) of consumers allows unravelling of feeding interactions in a wide range of animals. This is of particular advantage for analyzing the diet of small invertebrates living in opaque habitats such as the soil. Due to their small body size, which complicates...

Forest canopies harbor extraordinary biodiversity, with Collembola being one of the most abundant arthropod taxa. However, much of the research on canopy biodiversity has focused on tropical and subtropical regions, leaving a gap in our understanding of canopy communities in temperate and boreal forests. Studying canopy Collembola along elevational...

Global change is transforming Earth’s ecological communities with severe consequences for the functions and services they provide. In temperate grasslands, home to a mesmerising diversity of invertebrates controlling multiple ecosystem processes and services, land-use intensification and climate change are two of the most important global-change dr...

Aim Soils harbour a large number of unicellular eukaryotic parasites of metazoans, particularly Apicomplexa. Apicomplexan distribution, their associations with hosts, and impacts of human‐dominated land use are little studied. We aimed to fill this gap by a biodiversity survey across large spatial scales. Location China. Time period May to Septem...

Plant nutrient uptake and productivity are driven by a multitude of factors that have been modified by human activities, such as climate change and the activity of decomposers. However, interactive effects of climate change and key decomposer groups like earthworms have rarely been studied. In a field microcosm experiment we investigated the effect...

Forest canopies maintain a high proportion of arthropod diversity. The drivers that structure these communities, however, are poorly understood. Therefore, integrative research connecting tree species identity and environmental stand properties with taxonomic and functional community composition of canopy arthropods is required. In this study, we i...

Lignocellulose is a major component of plant biomass. Its decomposition is crucial for the terrestrial carbon cycle. Microorganisms are considered as primary decomposers and evidence increases that some invertebrates may also decompose lignocellulose. We investigated the taxonomic distribution and evolutionary origins of GH45 cellulases in a collec...

The relationship of plant diversity and several ecosystem functions strengthens over time. This suggests that the restructuring of biotic interactions in the process of a community’s assembly and the associated changes in function differ between species-rich and species-poor communities. An important component of these changes is the feedback betwe...

The tropical Andes are a species-rich and nitrogen-limited system, susceptible to increased nitrogen (N) inputs from the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the impacts of increased N input on belowground systems, in particular on protists and their role in nutrient cycling, remains limited. We explored how increased N affects protists in tro...

The relationship of plant diversity and several ecosystem functions strengthens over time. This suggests that the restructuring of biotic interactions in the process of a community’s assembly and the associated changes in function differ between species-rich and species-poor communities. An important component of these changes is the feedback betwe...

Human activities are increasing the input of atmospheric particulate pollutants to forests. The components of particulate pollutants include inorganic anions, base cations and hydrocarbons. Continuous input of particulate pollutants may affect soil functioning in forests, but their effects may be modified by soil fauna. However, studies investigati...

Distance-decay of similarity is one of the most widely studied patterns in biogeography. Both geographic distance and environmental distance can cause distance-decay of similarity in ecological communities. Here, we studied distance-decay relationships of bacteria in the gut of an earthworm species, Eisenia nordenskioldi, which is widely distribute...