Contrasting energetic pathways and successional trajectories of soil food webs in natural succession and reforestation-based restoration

<p dir="ltr">The dataset contains the raw and processed data, and the R script, used in the manuscript entitled "Contrasting energetic pathways and successional trajectories of soil food webs in natural succession and reforestation-based restoration." Data were collected in southwestern China from sites representing two restoration pathways, natural succession and reforestation, across four restoration ages (30, 40, 50 and 80 years), with a primary forest included as a reference.

The dataset covers soil fauna spanning a broad range of body sizes, including free-living soil nematodes, microarthropods and macrofauna, together with associated litter, soil and microbial variables.</p><p dir="ltr">The dataset is structured across five files:</p><p dir="ltr">RegressionEquation_BodymassCalculate.xlsx contains the regression equations used to estimate soil animals' body mass.</p><p dir="ltr">Dataset - Soil food-web fluxes calculation.xlsx provides, for every plot (including the primary forest reference, PR200), the density, biomass, body size, and feeding/protection traits of soil nematodes, microarthropods and macrofauna, together with their metabolic rate data — all information needed for soil food-web reconstruction and energy-flux calculation (see the accompanying "metadata." sheets within the workbook for a full description of every column).</p><p dir="ltr">R code - Soil food-web fluxes calculation.R contains the R code used to reconstruct the soil food webs from the Dataset file above and to calculate the resulting energy fluxes, trophic levels, and food-web figures.</p><p dir="ltr">Environmental variables_22102024.xlsx contains the abiotic soil (temperature, moisture, bulk density, pH, total and available nutrients), litter (biomass, C:N ratio, lignin, cellulose) and microbial (PLFA-based biomass, fungal-to-bacterial ratio) variables measured across the natural succession and reforestation restoration gradients, including the primary forest reference (see the accompanying "ReadMe" sheet for a full description of every variable).</p><p dir="ltr">All energy flux analysis data.xlsx contains the plot-level total energy flux, flux-to-biomass and flux-to-richness ratios, and the functional (e.g. herbivory, predation, fungivory) and size-class (micro- vs. macro-food web) flux summaries derived from the reconstructed food webs, including the primary forest reference, corresponding to the manuscript's figures.</p>