Habitat Preference of living things is one of factors affecting species distribution and the community structure. The impact of a biotic population on environment determines the strength of habitat preference of population. Soil fauna, as an important functional component of underground ecosystem, plays an important part in Carbon/ Nitrogen cycling. In past work, generally, redundancy analysis (RDA), canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) were used to construct sort graph showing soil fauna distribution in various habitats and its relations to the environment. These graphs are qualitative and less attention was given to the habitat preference of soil fauna and related influencing factors. However, the quantitative evaluation on the habitat preference of soil fauna helps better understanding the mechanisms of soil fauna distribution and has certain significance for biological conservation and forest management.
Phi Coefficient of association has been widely used in quantification of the strength of preference to various habitat types in vegetation ecology but less used in soil ecology. Based on the experiment results of soil replacement between two mid-subtropical forest types in Huitong County, Hunan Province, Prof WANG Silong and his Plantation Ecology Research Group evaluated the applicability of phi coefficient in quantification of the habitat preference of soil fauna. Canonical correlation analysis (CCorA) indicates that the predictive multi degree matrix is highly correlated to corresponding habitat preference strength matrix (Pillai’s trace statistic =1.996, p= 0.007). The two matrices, respectively, produced sort graphs showing extremely high similarity. Linear correlation analysis indicated that to Nematode, Acari, Colembola and Hemiptera of soil fauna, there is significant positive correlation between predictive abundance and habitat preference strength. While, the relations between the habitat preference of dominant soil animals Acari, Collembola and Hymenoptera is highly dependent on soil organic Carbon, Total Nitrogen and soil pH.
The results indicate that on the coarse classification level, Pearson joint coefficient can be used to evaluate the strength of the habitat preference of soil fauna and the information from it is well complementary with traditional sequencing. This would help us make better understanding on the relations of soil fauna with habitat conditions.
The work was supported by a project Ecosystem Management and Soil Carbon Sequestration Process (2011CB403203) in National Key Basic Research and Development Plan. The work has been published in PloS ONE entitled as Evaluating the Applicability of Phi Coefficient in Indicating Habitat Preferences of Forest Soil Fauna Based on a Single Field Study in Subtropical China.
