Mammal and tree diversity accumulate different types of soil organic matter in the northern Amazon

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URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10347/45763
E-ISSN: 2589-0042
DOI: 10.1016/ j.isci.2023.106088

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2023-03-17

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Diversity of plants and animals influence soil carbon through their contributions to soil organic matter (SOM). However, we do not know whether mammal and tree communities affect SOM composition in the same manner. This question is relevant because not all forms of carbon are equally resistant to mineralization by microbes and thus, relevant to carbon storage. We analyzed the elemental and molecular composition of 401 soil samples, with relation to the species richness of 83 mammal and tree communities at a landscape scale across 4.8 million hectares in the northern Amazon. We found opposite effects of mammal and tree richness over SOM composition. Mammal diversity is related to SOM rich in nitrogen, sulfur and iron whereas tree diversity is related to SOM rich in aliphatic and carbonyl compounds. These results help us to better understand the role of biodiversity in the carbon cycle and its implications for climate change mitigation.

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Environmental science| Ecology| Biological sciences

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Losada, M., Martínez Cortizas, A. M., Silvius, K. M., Varela, S., Raab, T. K., Fragoso, J. M. V., & Sobral, M. (2023). Mammal and tree diversity accumulate different types of soil organic matter in the northern Amazon. iScience, 26(3), 106088. 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106088

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Funding for soil and soil biodiversity integrative analysis came from Xunta de Galicia (Spain) under the grant I2C (Ref. ED481D 2019/024) and the grant Consolidation 2021 GRC GI-1553 EcoPast (Ref. ED431C2021/32), and the European Research Council (ERC), European Union, under the MAPAS ERC Starting Grant 2020– 2025 (grant agreement No 947921). Funding for soil, human and biodiversity data collection came from the National Science Foundation (NSF; Grant BE/CNH 05 08094) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (US). All primary data on plant and animal diversity and all soil samples used in this paper were collected by indigenous Makushi, Wapishana and Wai-Wai technicians as part of the Project Fauna Collaborative Science project, and the research design considered their traditional ways of land and resource use. K. Epps, D. Turner and E. Kurten collaborated with soil sampling and CNH analysis, and A. Cummings supervised plant data collection. The Guyana Environmental Protection Agency and the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs issued permission to work in the Rupununi region of Guyana. We thank the Iwokrama International Center for Rain-forest Conservation, the North Rupununi District Development Board, and the Deep South Toshaos’ Council for their support during this fieldwork. We thank the internship students at EcoPast lab (M.A. Suárez, E. Fernández, M. Méndez) for their help in sample processing and FTIR-ATR measurements and A. Milcu for his advice on statistics.

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© 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Centro de Investigación Interdisciplinar en Tecnoloxías Ambientais (CRETUS)