Understanding what drives soil fauna species composition through space and time is crucial because we should preserve soil fauna biodiversity and its key role in ecosystem functioning in this era of fast environmental change. As plant leaf litter provides both food and habitat for soil fauna, a focus on litter traits that relate to these two functions will help in understanding soil invertebrate community structure and dynamics comprehensively. To advance this agenda, we propose a conceptual framework to explicitly link the invertebrate community composition to the temporal dynamics of the litter trait space defined by two axes: a food-quality axis related to plant resource economics and chemistry and a habitat-quality axis related to litter particle size and shape.

了解在空间和时间上驱动土壤动物物种组成的因素至关重要，因为在这个快速的环境变化时代，我们应该保护土壤动物生物多样性及其在生态系统功能中的关键作用。由于植物凋落物为土壤动物提供食物和栖息地，因此关注与这两个功能相关的凋落物性状将有助于全面了解土壤无脊椎动物的群落结构和动力学。为了推进这一议程，我们提出了一个概念框架，将无脊椎动物群落组成与凋落物性状空间的时间动态明确地联系起来，该动态由两个轴定义：与植物资源经济学和化学有关的食物质量轴与与植物资源经济学和化学有关的栖息地质量轴乱抛垃圾的大小和形状。