DOI: 10.5061/dryad.14qd4q6
title: Data from: Linking size spectrum, energy flux and trophic multifunctionality in soil food webs of tropical land-use systems

description: 1. Many ecosystem functions depend on the structure of food webs, which
 heavily relies on the body size spectrum of the community. Despite that,
 little is known on how the size spectrum of soil animals responds to
 agricultural practices in tropical land-use systems and how these
 responses affect ecosystem functioning. 2. We studied land-use induced
 changes in belowground communities in tropical lowland ecosystems in
 Sumatra (Jambi province, Indonesia), a hotspot of tropical rainforest
 conversion to rubber and oil palm plantations. The study included ca.
 30,000 measured individuals from 33 high-order taxa of meso- and
 macrofauna spanning eight orders of magnitude in body mass. Using
 individual body masses we calculated the metabolism of trophic guilds and
 used food-web models to calculate energy fluxes and infer ecosystem
 functions, such as decomposition, herbivory, primary and intraguild
 predation. 3. Land-use change was associated with reduced abundance and
 taxonomic diversity of soil invertebrates, but strong increase in total
 biomass and moderate changes in total energy flux. These changes were due
 to increased biomass of large-sized decomposers in soil, in particular
 earthworms, with their share in community metabolism increasing from 11%
 in rainforest to 59-76% in jungle rubber, and rubber and oil palm
 plantations. Decomposition, i.e. the energy flux to decomposers, stayed
 unchanged, but herbivory, primary and intraguild predation decreased by an
 order of magnitude in plantation systems. Intraguild predation was very
 important, being responsible for 38% of the energy flux in rainforest
 according to our model. 4. Conversion of rainforest into monoculture
 plantations is associated by an uneven loss of size classes and trophic
 levels of soil invertebrates resulting in sequestration of energy in
 large-sized primary consumers and restricted flux of energy to higher
 trophic levels. Pronounced differences between rainforest and jungle
 rubber reflect sensitivity of rainforest soil animal communities to
 moderate land-use changes. Soil communities in plantation systems
 sustained high total energy flux despite reduced biodiversity. The high
 energy flux into large decomposers but low energy fluxes to other trophic
 guilds suggests that trophic multifunctionality of belowground communities
 is compromised in plantation systems.
description: Functional groups of
 soil fauna in rainforest, rubber and oil palm
 plantationsThe dataset contains
 supplementary data of the article and consists of four data spreadsheets,
 an R script and a description. The main spreadsheet gives density, biomass
 and taxa richness of soil invertebrates from different functional groups
 (decomposers, herbivores, omnivores (ants) and predators) in rainforest,
 jungle rubber agroforest, rubber monoculture and oil palm monoculture.
 Additional spreadsheets provide information on density of different size
 classes, energy fluxes between functional groups and proportion of energy,
 used by earthworms. R script describes energy flux calculations. More
 details are given in the description and in the
 article.Potapov2019_Supplementary.zip