Vicuña antipredator diel movement drives spatial nutrient subsidies in a high Andean ecosystem

The underappreciated roles of aboveground vertebrates on belowground communities

In recent decades, evidence of interactions between aboveground and belowground (i.e., soil) subsystems has accumulated. The effects of aboveground vertebrates on belowground communities have traditionally focused on plant-mediated pathways, but we show that aboveground vertebrates impact belowground communities and ecological functions without plant-mediated pathways via both consumptive and non-consumptive processes. We then show that mobile, aboveground vertebrates have significant but often unrealized potential to structure soil communities from local to macroecological scales by linking aboveground and belowground food webs across habitats and ecosystems. Collectively, this synthesis of aboveground vertebrate effects on belowground communities integrates multiple ecological disciplines to advance a more comprehensive understanding of aboveground-belowground linkages across space and time.

Vicuña antipredator diel movement drives spatial nutrient subsidies in a high Andean ecosystem

Large animals could be important drivers of spatial nutrient subsidies when they ingest resources in some habitats and release them in others, even moving nutrients against elevational gradients. In high Andean deserts, vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) move daily between nutrient-rich wet meadows, where there is abundant water and forage but high risk of predation by pumas (Puma concolor), and nutrient-poor open plains with lower risk of predation. In all habitats, vicuñas defecate and urinate in communal latrines. We investigated how these latrines impacted soil and plant nutrient concentrations across three habitats in the Andean ecosystem (meadows, plains, and canyons) and used stable isotope analysis to explore the source of fecal nutrients in latrines. Latrine soils had higher concentrations of nitrogen, carbon, and other nutrients than did nonlatrine soils across all habitats. These inputs corresponded with an increase in plant quality (lower C:N) at latrine sites in plains and canyons, but not in meadows. Stable isotope mixing models suggest that ~7% of nutrients in plains latrines originated from vegetation in meadows, which is disproportionately higher than the relative proportion of meadow habitat (2.6%) in the study area. In contrast, ~68% of nutrients in meadow latrines appear to originate from plains and canyon vegetation, though these habitats made up nearly 98% of the study area. Vicuña diel movements thus appear to concentrate nutrients in latrines within habitats and to drive cross-habitat nutrient subsidies, with disproportionate transport from low-lying, nutrient-rich meadows to more elevated, nutrient-poor plains. When these results are scaled up to the landscape scale, the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus subsidized in soil at plains latrines was of the same order of magnitude as estimates of annual atmospheric nitrogen and phosphorus deposition for this region (albeit far more localized and patchy). Thus, vicuña-mediated nutrient redistribution and deposition appears to be an important process impacting ecosystem functioning in arid Andean environments, on par with other major inputs of nutrients to the system.