Weighing in: Size spectra as a standard tool in soil community analyses

The variety and abundance of organism sizes in a community allows valuable conclusions to be drawn concerning trophic transfer efficiency, process rate dynamics, and ecological stability. Body size spectrum analyses have been applied to great effect in aquatic systems, but have only relatively recently gained interest for the description of soil communities. This approach should be added to existing sorting protocols and adopted as a standard tool of soil fauna analysis because of its ease of use, universal applicability regardless of taxonomy, and value as a predictor of both soil fauna function and response. This paper reviews the available methods for calculating soil fauna mass, constructing of body size spectra, and relating these spectra to existing fauna analysis frameworks such as the nematode maturity index. We also detail several of the functional conclusions that can be drawn from shifts in body size spectra and how this methodology can be further improved to supplement existing soil ecology methods.