Nematodes, exotic earthworms and nitrogen addition: interactions between global change factors lead to cancellation effects.

Photos from the experiment described in Shao et al. (): (a) the endogeic (i.e. earthworms that typically live in the soil, burrowing horizontally to acquire nutrients) earthworm Pontoscolex corethrurus that was added to the plots; (b) P. corethrurus in a quiescence state in response to drought; (c) set-up of the control plots (i.e. no earthworms, ambient nitrogen) used in this experiment. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] In Focus: Shao, Y., Zhang, W., Eisenhauer, N., Liu, T., Xiong, Y., Liang, C. & Fu, S. (2017) Nitrogen deposition cancels out exotic earthworm effects on plant-feeding nematode communities. Journal of Animal Ecology, 86, 708-717. In this issue of Journal of Animal Ecology, Shao et al. () explored how N addition and exotic earthworms interacted to impact on the plant-feeding nematode community. They demonstrate that exotic earthworm presence alone increased the abundance of less harmful plant-feeding nematodes and decreased the abundance of the more harmful plant-feeding nematodes. However, in plots receiving both exotic earthworms and N addition, such earthworm effects on the nematode community were negated. These findings pull focus on the need to simultaneously consider multiple global change factors (e.g. exotic species invasions and N deposition) when making predictions about how such factors might affect above- and below-ground interactions and thereby alter ecosystem function.