Artròpodes del sòl i canvi global

Títol: Arthropods living in the soil: responses to global change and implications to ecosystem functioning

Below our feet soils harbor an extremely rich and usually overlooked amount of biodiversity. Soil fauna, and particularly soil and litter-dwelling arthropods, play a fundamental role on key ecosystem functions like organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling. However, we are still far from understanding and forecast how they will respond to on-going global change drivers and whether these impacts will have consequences to Earth system functioning. Among the main hindrances impairing the study of soil arthropods are their challenging taxonomy and scarce basic knowledge of their typically rich and complex communities. Besides, there are still few attempts to assess at relevant spatial scales the relationships between different dimensions of soil fauna diversity and the ecosystem functions with which they are involved. In this SEMBIO seminar I will provide an overview of some recent research revolving around these topics. First, I will describe a climate change field experiment replicated across six European shrublands and I will show how sensitive the communities of springtails are to an increase of drought but not so to moderate warming, which are the consequences over their taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional richness at a community level, and additionally, I will demonstrate their potential to inform about a principal ecosystem function like litter decomposition. Secondly, I will present a large collaborative experiment we have been conducting in French Guiana during the last 4 years where we have been investigating the role of nutrient availability in tropical forests. In particular, I will explain how nutrient scarcity may increase the importance of the control that soil fauna exerts over Carbon and Nitrogen cycling thereby buffering to a remarkable extent nutrient shortages at an ecosystem level. And finally, I will conclude with our efforts to apply a metabarcoding approach to describe the extremely diverse communities of litter-dwelling hexapods and our first attempts to decipher the relative importance of biogeochemical properties among other environmental and ecological features during their assembly process.

Ponent: Guille Peguero, investigador postdoctoral en la Unitat d’Ecologia Global (CREAF-CSIC).

Idioma vehicular: anglès.

Lloc: sala d’actes del Castell dels Tres Dragons (Laboratori de Natura, pg. Picasso, s/n)

Imatge de Coffee.

Dins el programa de Seminaris de Biodiversitat, SEMBIO. Debat i intercanvi d’experiències essencialment sobre sistemàtica, zoologia, evolució animal i filogènia molecular. Aquestes xerrades estan organitzades pel Grup de Recerca Consolidat ZooSysEvo format per científics de la Facultat de Biologia (UB) i del Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. L’objectiu és difondre els continguts de la recerca d’investigadors del grup o d’algun investigador convidat.