Tancredi Caruso

University College Dublin | UCD · School of Biology and Environmental Science

Knowledge of the trophic ecology of soil animals is important for understanding their high alpha diversity as well as their functional role in soil food webs and systems. In the last 20 years, the analysis of natural variations in stable isotope ratios (15N/14N, 13C/12C) has revolutionized our view on soil animal trophic ecology. Here, we review th...

The dispersion of microorganisms through the atmosphere is a continual and essential process that underpins biogeography and ecosystem development and function. Despite the ubiquity of atmospheric microorganisms globally, specific knowledge of the determinants of atmospheric microbial diversity at any given location remains unresolved. Here we desc...

Modification of soil food webs by land management may alter the response of ecosystem processes to climate extremes, but empirical support is limited and the mechanisms involved remain unclear. Here we quantify how grassland management modifies the transfer of recent photosynthates and soil nitrogen through plants and soil food webs during a post-d...

Ecological networks such as plant–pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global properties such as the total number and intensity of interactions in the network but also in the number and intensity of local (i.e. node level) species interactions. Fluctuations of species' properties can sig...

Theory and experiments have demonstrated that negative plant-soil feedback (PSF) promotes coexistence between plant species. Plants and soils, however, face the challenge of an increasingly unpredictable environment due to multiple global change factors. Environmental stochasticity induces fluctuations that increase the variability and unpredictabi...

Sex is evolutionarily more costly than parthenogenesis, evolutionary ecologists therefore wonder why sex is much more frequent than parthenogenesis in the majority of animal lineages. Intriguingly, parthenogenetic individuals and species are as common as or even more common than sexuals in some major and putative ancient animal lineages such as ori...

Swidden agriculture is a widespread subsistence farming method in the tropics, which is being intensified as human populations grow. This study is the first to investigate the impacts of land degradation from swidden upon ant species (both native and introduced) across the full degradation gradient, from forest, to tree fallows, to shrub fallows, t...

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Ecologists have long debated the properties that confer stability to complex, species-rich ecological networks. Species-level soil food...

There is an increasing interest in understanding how soil microbial communities respond to perturbations associated with global change. Much of the currently available knowledge is based on controlled laboratory experiments, large scale surveys and manipulative studies in which one perturbation, for example drought, is applied under a range of cond...

Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems vary systematically in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions in the network, but also in the local properties of individual nodes, such as the number and intensity of species-level interactions. Fluct...

Agricultural intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss, with the implementation of Agri‐Environment Schemes (AESs) being a widespread policy designed to prevent further loss, and to maintain or restore ecosystem health. Upland grassland soils are disproportionately impacted by intensification including drainage, artificial fertiliser u...

Carrion is a frequent but overlooked source of nutrients to the soil. The decomposition of carrion is accelerated by invertebrate scavengers but the impact of the scavengers on below‐ground biota and its functions is scarcely known. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the effects of the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides on the...

Fungi are essential components of all terrestrial ecosystems. Despite the crucial ecological role of soil fungi in grasslands, knowledge about fungal community diversity and structure in Mediterranean meadow habitats is still fragmentary. We analysed macrofungal communities in three geographically distinct Mediterranean montane calcareous grassland...

Atmospheric transport is critical to dispersal of microorganisms between habitats and this underpins resilience in terrestrial and marine ecosystems globally 1,2 . Conventional dogma that this is a neutral process involving ubiquitous distribution in air has been challenged by recent advances 3–5 . However, the lack of standardized methods and anal...

Atmospheric transport is critical to dispersal of microorganisms between habitats and this underpins resilience in terrestrial and marine ecosystems globally. A key unresolved question is whether microorganisms assemble to form a taxonomically distinct, geographically variable, and functionally adapted atmospheric microbiome. Here we characterised...

Atmospheric transport is critical to dispersal of microorganisms between habitats and this underpins resilience in terrestrial and marine ecosystems globally. A key unresolved question is whether microorganisms assemble to form a taxonomically distinct, geographically variable, and functionally adapted atmospheric microbiota. Here we characterised...

Atmospheric transport is critical to dispersal of microorganisms between habitats, and this underpins resilience in terrestrial and marine ecosystems globally. A key unresolved question is whether microorganisms assemble to form a taxonomically distinct, geographically variable, and functionally adapted atmospheric microbiota. This question is made...

Hedge density, structure, and function vary with primary production and slope gradient and are subject to other diverse factors. Hedgerows are emerging ecosystems with both above- and belowground components. Functions of hedges can be categorized as provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting ecosystem services; these functions include food...

Motivation and aim Soil biodiversity is central to ecosystem function and services. It represents most of terrestrial biodiversity and at least a quarter of all biodiversity on Earth. Yet, research into broad, generalizable spatial and temporal patterns of soil biota has been limited compared to aboveground systems due to complexities of the soil s...

There is evidence and serious concern that microplastics have reached the most remote regions of the planet, but how far have they travelled in terrestrial ecosystems? This study presents the first field-based evidence of plastic ingestion by a common and central component of Antarctic terrestrial food webs, the collembolan Cryptopygus antarcticus....

Our knowledge of root mass decomposition processes has greatly benefited from studies carried out in natural and semi‐natural ecosystems. It is less known, however, how root mass loss might occur in intensively managed ecosystems, such as agricultural grasslands, which receive chronic additions of nitrogen (N) fertilizers. Key questions remain abou...

As the most abundant animals on earth, nematodes are a dominant component of the soil community. They play critical roles in regulating biogeochemical cycles and vegetation dynamics within and across landscapes and are an indicator of soil biological activity. Here, we present a comprehensive global dataset of soil nematode abundance and functional...

A major challenge for advancing our understanding of the functional role of soil microbial communities is to link changes in their structure and function under climate change. To address this challenge requires new understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the capacity of soil microbial communities to resist and recover from climate extremes. H...

The importance of microbial and plant communities in the control of the diversity and structure of soil animal communities has been clarified over the last decade. Previous research focused on abiotic factors, niche separation and spatial patterns. Significant gaps still exist in our knowledge of the factors that control the stability of these comm...

The atmosphere is the least understood biome on Earth despite its critical role as a microbial transport medium. The influence of surface cover on composition of airborne microbial communities above marine systems is unclear. Here we report evidence for a dynamic microbial presence at the ocean–atmosphere interface of a major marine ecosystem, the...

The early evolution of ecosystems in Palaeozoic soils remains poorly understood because the fossil record is sparse, despite the preservation of soil microarthropods already from the Early Devonian (~410 Mya). The soil food web plays a key role in the functioning of ecosystems and its organisms currently express traits that have evolved over 400 my...

Soil organisms are a crucial part of the terrestrial biosphere. Despite their importance for ecosystem functioning, few quantitative, spatially explicit models of the active belowground community currently exist. In particular, nematodes are the most abundant animals on Earth, filling all trophic levels in the soil food web. Here we use 6,759 geore...

1. The role of niche partitioning in structuring species-rich soil animal communities has been debated for decades and generated the "enigma of soil animal diversity." More recently, resource-based niche partitioning has been hypothesized to play a very limited role in the assembly of soil animal communities. To test this hypothesis , we applied a...

Theory suggests that more complex food webs promote stability and can buffer the effects of perturbations, such as drought, on soil organisms and ecosystem functions. Here, we tested experimentally how soil food web trophic complexity modulates the response to drought of soil functions related to carbon cycling and the capture and transfer below‐gr...

Dispersal is a critical yet poorly understood factor underlying macroecological patterns in microbial communities ¹ . Airborne microbial transport is assumed to occupy a central role in determining dispersal outcomes 2,3 , and extra-range dispersal has important implications for predicting ecosystem resilience and response to environmental change ⁴...

The dominance of sex in Metazoa is enigmatic. Sexual species allocate resources to the production of males, while potentially facing negative effects such as the loss of well-adapted genotypes due to recombination, and exposure to diseases and predators during mating. Two major hypotheses have been put forward to explain the advantages of parthenog...

The aerosphere is the least understood biome on Earth despite its critical role as a microbial transport medium. The influence of surface cover on composition of airborne microbial communities above marine systems is unclear. Here we report evidence for a dynamic microbial presence at the ocean-atmosphere interface of a major marine ecosystem, the...

Front cover: The cover image of four common oribatid mite species in the families Galumnidae, Nothridae, Oppiidae, and Phthiracaridae, is based on the Research Paper Oribatid mites show how climate and latitudinal gradients in organic matter can drive large-scale biodiversity patterns of soil communities by Tancredi Caruso et al., DOI: 10.1111/jbi....

Abiotic and biotic factors control ecosystem biodiversity, but their relative contributions remain unclear. The ultraoligotrophic ecosystem of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, a simple yet highly heterogeneous ecosystem, is a natural laboratory well-suited for resolving the abiotic and biotic controls of community structure. We undertook a multidisciplin...

Abiotic factors are major determinants of soil animal distributions and their dominant role is pronounced in extreme ecosystems, with biotic interactions seemingly playing a minor role. We modelled co-occurrence and distribution of the three nematode species that dominate the soil food web of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (Antarctica). Abiotic factors, o...

Aim The factors determining spatial distributions and diversity of terrestrial invertebrates are typically investigated at small scales. Large‐scale studies are lacking for soil animals, which control microbial communities and represent one of the most diverse yet poorly known animal assemblages. Here, we analyzed a major group (Oribatida) to test...

Dispersal is a critical yet poorly understood factor underlying macroecological patterns in microbial communities. Airborne microbial transport is assumed to occupy a central role in determining dispersal outcomes and extra-range dispersal has important implications for predicting ecosystem resilience and response to environmental change. One of th...

This article is a Commentary on Rasmussen et al., 220: 1247–1260.

Antarctic soil supports surface microbial communities that are dependent on ephemeral moisture. Understanding the response to availability of this resource is essential to predicting how the system will respond to climate change. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest ice-free soil region in Antarctica. They are a hyper-arid polar desert with extr...

The persistence of soil organic carbon (SOC) has traditionally been explained as a combination of recalcitrance properties and stabilization processes, which lead to the formation of complex organic compounds. However, recent conceptual advances and experimental evidence challenge this view. Here, we test these conceptual advances using a dynamic e...

Orchids are critically dependent on fungi for seedling establishment and growth, so the distribution and diversity of orchids might depend on the associated fungal communities. We characterised the communities associated with eight orchid species in three Mediterranean protected areas, using a combination of above-ground analyses of sporophores and...

Paenibacillus polymyxa has been shown to have great potential as a bio-fertiliser and biocontrol agent, however information regarding its effect on below-ground biota when used as a soil additive is scarce. Below-ground biota provide vital services to boost plant performance and thus knowledge regarding their response to bio-fertiliser and biocontr...

Background and aims Plant diversity – ecosystem processes relationships are essential to our understanding of ecosystem functioning. We aimed at disentangling the nature of such relationships in a mesotrophic grassland that was highly heterogeneous with regards to nutrient availability. Methods Rather than targeting primary productivity, like most...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are recognized as important drivers of plant health and productivity in agriculture but very often existing knowledge is limited to the topsoil. With growing interest in the role of subsoil in sustainable agriculture, we used high-throughput Illumina sequencing on a set of samples encompassing drilosphere, rhizosphere a...

Hedgerows often contain large numbers of tree standards which provide a range of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. A stratified random survey indicated that there are ca. 5.3 million hedgerow tree standards in the six counties of Northern Ireland, of which 2.9 million (56.7%) are ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior). Of the six most common h...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are recognized as important drivers of plant health and productivity in agriculture but very often existing knowledge is limited to the topsoil. With growing interest in the role of subsoil in sustainable agriculture, we used high-throughput Illumina sequencing on a set of samples encompassing drilosphere, rhizosphere a...

Ecologists increasingly appreciate the central role that urban biodiversity plays in ecosystems, however much urban biodiversity is neglected, especially some very diverse groups of invertebrates. For the first time in southern Europe, land snail communities are analysed in four urban habitats along a geographical gradient of three cities, using qu...

The availability of global microbial diversity data, collected using standardized metabarcoding techniques, makes microorganisms promising models for investigating the role of regional and local factors in driving biodiversity. Here we modelled the global diversity of symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi using currently available data on AM...

The ecological interactions that occur in and with soil are of consequence in many ecosystems on the planet. These interactions provide numerous essential ecosystem services, and the sustainable management of soils has attracted increasing scientific and public attention. Although soil ecology emerged as an independent field of research many decade...

The concept of function arises at all levels of biological study and is often loosely and variously defined, especially within ecology. This has led to ambiguity, obscuring the common structure that unites levels of biological organisation, from molecules to ecosystems. Here we build on already successful ideas from molecular biology and complexity...

Orchids depend on mycorrhizal fungi for their nutrition, at least in the early stages of their growth and development, and in many cases throughout the life. In spite of the increasing number of studies describing fungal diversity in orchids, there is still more to be learnt about the identity of fungal partners and specificity in orchid mycorrhiza...