Energetic and functional development of soil food webs along secondary succession

Along secondary succession in southwestern China, soil food webs show reduced energy turnover, with animal biomass-to-energy flux rising and energy shifting from herbivory to detritivory.

• Why it matters: Aboveground patterns are known, but successional theory has been unclear for soil food webs that channel most terrestrial energy.
• What they did: Using an energy-flux approach across size-based compartments (nematodes to soil arthropods and earthworms), the study compared successional stages and tested spruce and larch plantations against secondary birch forest at the same stage.
• The result: Macro-food webs shifted toward bacterial energy with decreasing predation, while micro-food webs kept similar bacterial/fungal flux ratios and tended toward higher predation; larch had lower animal biomass than birch, spruce matched it.

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