Soil communities are impacted by increasingly frequent and intense climate extremes. To accurately predict the effects of these events on soil communities and effectively design recovery and management programs for soil biodiversity, it is necessary to understand the spatiotemporal patterns and mechanisms underlying the soil community responses. Here, we investigated a mangrove soil macrofaunal (mollusk) community before and after an extreme cold event (ECE) to determine the effects of the ECE on the spatial pattern, temporal succession, and deterministic and stochastic processes affecting the soil metacommunity. We used distance-decay and time-decay analyses to characterize the spatial pattern and temporal succession of soil mollusk community dissimilarity (e.g., species identity, abundance, and biomass) across a reginal scale (~350 km scale). We used null models to compare the relative importance of deterministic and stochastic processes in shaping the regional soil mollusk community assembly. The ECE resulted in a reorganization of the soil mollusk metacommunity reflected by the mortality and extinction of several original species, colonization by new opportunistic species, and a significant reduction in mollusk abundance and biomass. The ECE increased divergent temporal succession but decreased spatial segregation in the soil mollusks, consistent with changes in the community dissimilarity of species abundance, richness, and biomass. The ECE increased the numbers of non-random segregated and random structures of soil mollusks while decreased the number of non-random aggregated communities. Notably, non-random segregated communities were the most strongly affected. Thus, the response of the soil mollusk metacommunity to the ECE was mediated by an increase in limiting similarity processes and stochastic processes and a decrease in limiting dissimilarity processes. The dominant limiting similarity processes involved species competition and/or dispersal limitation. More broadly, our study indicated that alterations in the spatiotemporal dynamics of soil fauna in response to climate change should be studied at the metacommunity scale. These spatiotemporal dynamics should be further tested in an ecological processes framework to reliably evaluate soil community responses to climate change and to devise management strategies for global soils.

土壤社区受到越来越频繁和强烈的气候极端事件的影响。为了准确预测这些事件对土壤群落的影响并有效地设计土壤生物多样性的恢复和管理计划，有必要了解土壤群落响应的时空模式和机制。在这里，我们调查了极端寒冷事件（ECE）之前和之后的红树林土壤大型动物群落（软体动物），以确定ECE对空间模式，时间演替以及影响土壤亚群落的确定性和随机过程的影响。我们使用距离衰减和时间衰减分析来表征区域范围（〜350 km范围）内的土壤软体动物群落异质性（例如物种同一性，丰度和生物量）的空间格局和时间序列。我们使用空模型来比较确定性过程和随机过程在塑造区域性软体动物群落组装过程中的相对重要性。ECE导致了土壤软体动物群落的重组，这体现在几个原始物种的死亡和灭绝，新的机会物种的定居以及软体动物丰富度和生物量的显着降低。欧洲经委会增加了不同的时间演替，但减少了土壤软体动物中的空间隔离，这与物种丰富度，丰富度和生物量的群落异质性变化相一致。ECE增加了土壤软体动物非随机隔离和随机结构的数量，同时减少了非随机聚集社区的数量。值得注意的是，非随机隔离社区受到的影响最大。因此，限制相似性过程和随机过程的增加以及限制相似性过程的减少介导了土壤软体动物对ECE的反应。主要的限制性相似性过程涉及物种竞争和/或扩散限制。更广泛地说，我们的研究表明应在元社区规模上研究土壤动物响应气候变化的时空动态变化。这些时空动力学应在生态过程框架中进行进一步测试，以可靠地评估土壤群落对气候变化的反应并制定针对全球土壤的管理策略。