The response of soil nematode fauna to climate drying and warming in Stipa breviflora desert steppe in Inner Mongolia, China

Purpose Global warming and drying are important environmental issues. Our study aimed to investigate how warming and precipitation changes affect soil nematode communities in an Inner Mongolian desert steppe for 10 years. Materials and methods Soil nematodes were extracted by the Baermann funnel method. Changes in the nematode communities under artificial warming and precipitation conditions were assayed by analyzing their abundance and ecological indices. Results and discussion Soil nematode abundance decreased significantly by 37.47% under artificial warming; however, there was no significant effect of warming on the nematode community diversity. As for precipitation experiment, the decreased precipitation eliminated some of non-dominant nematode genera, such as Pratylenchus, Helicotylenchus, and Aphelenchus. It caused not only a significant decrease (37.65%) in soil nematode abundance but also a more structured food web and shorter food chain. However, nematode faunal analysis indicated that the soil nematode community was more resistant to drought. Both soil nematode abundance and community diversity increased significantly as increase of precipitation. In particular, the abundance of plant parasitic nematodes increased by 46.69%, which may due to the increase in total nitrogen content in soil. Nematode faunal analysis showed that increased precipitation improved soil environment for the nematodes, and increased food web connectivity and food chain length. However, bacterivorous nematode abundance decreased by 74.39%, and the decomposition pathway of the nematode community had switched from the bacterial channel to the fungal channel. Conclusions In the Inner Mongolian steppe, both climate drying and warming had negative impacts on soil nematode abundance; however, only drying affected nematode community diversity and food web structure and slowly changed nematode ecological functions. Increased precipitation may aid soil nematode community recovery.