Do soil fauna really hasten litter decomposition? A meta-analysis of enclosure studies

Abstract We present a meta-analysis of experiments in which researchers used litter bags or similar enclosures to explore three questions: Do soil macrofauna increase the removal of litter from the soil surface? How is this mass loss of litter by macrofauna affected by climate and litter quality? To what extent does litter loss from litter layer by macrofauna correspond with litter mineralization? In total, we found 132 published field experiments in which authors compared litter bags with mesh sizes that did permit or not permit access by soil fauna. Meta-analysis of these experiments indicated that litter removal was significantly greater from bags that did permitted rather than did not permitted soil macrofauna access. When we divided these studies according to climate, a significant positive effect of soil fauna on litter removal was only evident from the warm humid, temperate regions with correspond to deciduous forest zone. When studies from this climate zone were sorted according to litter C:N ratio, the effect of fauna was significant in all cases except when the ratio was low (