Dissecting earthworm diversity in tropical rainforests

Goulpeau Arnaud, Hedde Mickaël, Ganault Pierre, Lapied Emmanuel, Maggia Marie-Eugénie, Marcon Eric, Decaëns Thibaud. 2025. Dissecting earthworm diversity in tropical rainforests. Ecography:e07697, 11 p.

Url - jeu de données - Entrepôt autre : https://doi.org/10.5883/DS-EWFG2024 / Url - jeu de données - Entrepôt autre : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10908657

Résumé : Tropical rainforests are among the most emblematic ecosystems in terms of biodiversity. However, our understanding of the structure of tropical biodiversity is still incomplete, particularly for certain groups of soil organisms such as earthworms, whose importance for ecosystem functioning is widely recognised. This study aims at determining the relative contribution of alpha and beta components to earthworm regional diversity at a hierarchy of nested spatial scales in natural ecosystems of French Guiana. For this, we performed a hierarchical diversity partitioning of a large dataset on earthworm communities, in which DNA barcode-based operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were used as species surrogates. Observed regional diversity comprised 256 OTUs. We found that alpha diversity was lower than predicted by chance, regardless of the scale considered. Community-scale alpha diversity was on average 7 OTUs. Beta diversity among remote landscapes was higher than expected by chance, explaining as much as 87% of regional diversity. This points to regional mechanisms as the main driver of species diversity distribution in this group of organisms with low dispersal capacity. At more local scales, multiplicative beta diversity was higher than expected by chance between habitats, while it was lower than expected by chance between communities in the same habitat. This highlights the local effect of environmental filters on the species composition of communities. The calculation of a Chao 2 index predicts that as many as 1700 species could be present in French Guiana, which represents a spectacular increase compared with available checklists, and calls into question the commonly accepted estimates of global number of earthworm species.

Mots-clés Agrovoc : forêt tropicale humide, biodiversité, ver de terre

Mots-clés géographiques Agrovoc : Guyane française, France

Mots-clés libres : Alpha diversity, Beta diversity, Diversity partitioning, Oligochaeta, Tropical rainforest

Agences de financement européennes : European Regional Development Fund

Agences de financement hors UE : Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Région Guyane, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Projets sur financement : (FRA) CEnter of the study of Biodiversity in Amazonia, (FRA) Towards a Unified theory of biotic Interactions: the roLe of environmental, (FRA) BC-Wormbank

Auteurs et affiliations

• Goulpeau Arnaud, CNRS (FRA)
• Hedde Mickaël, INRAE (FRA)
• Ganault Pierre, Université de Rouen (FRA)
• Lapied Emmanuel, Taxonomia International Foundation (FRA)
• Maggia Marie-Eugénie, University of Guelph (CAN)
• Marcon Eric, CIRAD-BIOS-UMR AMAP (FRA)
• Decaëns Thibaud, CNRS (FRA)

Source : Cirad-Agritrop (https://agritrop.cirad.fr/613468/)

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