Living Soil Web

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Soil food webs · Animated figure

How energy moves through the soil food web beneath a maple

Two animated figures for presenting. Fig. 1 walks through the energy channels and the route into stable soil carbon. Fig. 2 follows carbon and nitrogen up the trophic levels, using the methods researchers rely on: ¹³C tracers, stable isotopes, respiration and food-web energetics.

Fig. 1

    Schematic. The soil profile has a depth scale; the tree, animals and leaves are not to scale, and the two insets are drawn to scale (see scale bars). The sequence runs about 1 min 50 s and loops. Organisms and channels follow the energy-channel food web of Moore & Hunt4; sugar maple and sycamore maple form arbuscular mycorrhizas.

    Fig. 2

      Schematic. In the timeline only the soil-CO₂ window is measured (ref. 11); the other rows show the order of labelling. Respiration, carbon flows and nitrogen release are our recalculation from the shortgrass-prairie parameters of Hunt et al. (ref. 19), as distributed in the soilfoodwebs R package. A prairie web is used because complete parameter sets for forest webs are rare, so the values show magnitudes and proportions, not the maple site.

      References

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