DOI: 10.5061/dryad.rxwdbrv7m
title: Data from: Belowground community turnover accelerates the decomposition of standing dead wood

description: Standing dead trees (snags) decompose more slowly than downed dead wood
 and provide critical habitat for many species. The rate at which snags
 fall therefore influences forest carbon dynamics and biodiversity. Fall
 rates correlate strongly with mean annual temperature, presumably because
 warmer climates facilitate faster wood decomposition and hence degradation
 of the structural stability of standing wood. These faster decomposition
 rates coincide with turnover from fungal-dominated wood decomposer
 communities in cooler forests to co-domination by fungi and termites in
 warmer regions. A key question for projecting forest dynamics is therefore
 whether temperature effects on wood decomposition arise primarily because
 warmer conditions facilitate faster decomposer metabolism, or are also
 influenced indirectly by belowground community turnover (e.g. termites
 exert additional influence beyond fungal-plus-bacterial mediated
 decomposition). To test between these possibilities, we simulate standing
 dead trees with untreated, wooden posts and follow them in the
 field across five years at 12 sites, before measuring buried, soil-air
 interface and aerial post sections to quantify wood decomposition and
 organism activities. High termite activities at the warmer sites are
 associated with rates of post fall that are 3-times higher than at the
 cooler sites. Termites primarily consume buried wood, with decomposition
 rates greatest where termite activities are highest. However, where higher
 microbial and termite activities co-occur, they appear to first compensate
 for one another and then slow decomposition rates at their highest
 activities, suggestive of interference competition. If the range
 of microbial- and termite co-domination of wood decomposer communities
 expands under climate warming, our data suggest that expansion will
 accelerate snag fall with consequent effects on forest carbon cycling and
 biodiversity in forests previously dominated by microbial decomposers.
description: These are field-collected data and samples, that were tthen
 additionally processed in the lab. Full methods are provided in the
 submitted paper.
description: Data and code, along with the ReadMe file
 'BradfordetalPostDataREADME.txt', were submitted to the Dryad
 data repository February 13th 2021 for private peer review. On paper
 acceptance by the journal Ecology, on May 27th 2021, the data were
 unchanged and the code was updated and then all files made fully
 accessible. Bradford MA, Maynard DS, Crowther TW,
 Frankson PT, Mohan JE, Steinrueck C, Veen, GF, King JR, Warren RJ.
 Belowground community turnover accelerates the decomposition of standing
 dead wood. ECOLOGY, accepted. The persons associated
 with the code and data have dedicated the work to the public domain by
 waiving all of their rights to the code and data worldwide under copyright
 law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed
 by law. You can copy, distribute and use the code and data, even for
 commercial purposes, all without asking permission. If
 you have queries about the data or code please contact Mark A. Bradford at
 Yale University, USA (mark.bradford@yale.edu). The code
 file is named ‘BradfordetalPostCode.txt’ and contains all R (the
 statistical freeware package) code used for data analysis in the
 manuscript. Analytical steps are explained ahead of each section of code
 within the code file.  The data files are named
 ‘BradfordetalPostData1.csv’ and ‘BradfordetalPostData2.csv’. A full
 description of the original purpose of these data, as well as the methods
 used to collect them, are described in the manuscript listed
 above. Data in the BradfordetalPostData1.csv file are
 organized across 79 columns, and 540 rows of data, with a single header
 row with the column title. Data in the
 BradfordetalPostData2.csv file are organized across 79 columns, and 180
 rows of data, with a single header row with the column title.
 Header row names, units and description are fully described for
 both data sets in BradfordetalMetaData.csv  We use ‘NA’
 for missing data.