Robustness of soil ecosystems under different regimes of management

TL;DR

This study compares three soil ecosystems with different management regimes, analyzing their food web structures and robustness to assess how human actions impact ecological stability and sustainability.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how different management practices influence soil ecosystem robustness and food web topology, highlighting the potential for ecological evaluation of agricultural methods.

Findings

Fallowed pastures with low pressure management are more robust.

All food webs exhibit small-world topology and disassortative nature.

Ecosystem robustness correlates with management intensity.

Abstract

In this study three soil ecosystems, that differ in the type of management, have been compared in the attempt to understand if and how anthropogenic action affects them. The structure of the corresponding food webs was analyzed and their robustness was calculated through the use of a dynamic model. With regard to the topology, it has been found that the structure of all three networks is small world. Furthermore, all three networks have a disassortative nature as expected for foodwebs. The values of the clustering coefficient, of the connectance and of the complexity, together with the calculation of the robustness suggest that the ecosystem related to a fallowed pastures with low pressure management is more robust than two ecosystems related to organic farms subject to middle intensity management. If the evidence suggested by this study was confirmed by further studies, the robustness shown by the networks could be useful for evaluating, from an ecological point of view, the sustainability of the agricultural practices to which the ecosystem is subject.