Land use change is one of the main drivers of global change. Despite the expansion of forest plantations worldwide, assuming a positive effect of their capacity to mitigate global warming and prevent soil erosion, questions have been raised about their real capacity to moderate climate change and their unknown effects on soils. Although forestry monocultures occupy more than 3 million hectares of land in south-central Chile, their ecological effects on soils and on soil biodiversity have not been assessed. Soil invertebrates are functionally relevant at the ecosystem scale because they modify soil chemical and physical properties that affect vegetation and at the same time, the plant community influences invertebrate diversity and abundance belowground. In this work, we compared soils of native Maulino forest remnants and pine monocultures on similar soils, with the aim of understanding changes in the structure and diversity of edaphic assemblages as a consequence of forest replacement by monocultures. We estimated differences in diversity, abundance, and community composition of the soil biota between native forests and pine monocultures, and analysed physical and chemical soil properties crucial for the biota, such as water content, water infiltration, nutrient status, and pH, which are also critical to plant-soil relationships.
Results/Conclusions
We found that both soil invertebrate communities and soil properties analysed differed significantly between native forest and monocultures sites, revealing a significant loss of soil fertility and a major reduction in taxonomic and functional diversity of soil invertebrates between forest and monoculture sites. Loss of biotic diversity above ground can have important consequences on key functions of soil organisms in the ecosystem. These changes occurring on a large scale may represent serious threats to soil ecosystem health, altering ecosystem properties that affect human wellbeing.