Effects on of abandonment on rare, common and widespread taxa.
For plants, springtails and mites, no taxa were classified as ‘relatively widespread’, which we defined as taxa present in >75% of all plots. In general, removal of grazing had a disproportionately large impact on rare taxa (according to our definition of the category rare: these are less ubiquitous taxa which are present in < 25% of all plots) compared to common and widespread taxa (Figure 4). For most groups of soil organisms and plants, rare species decreased more than the common species as a result of grazing removal, although for mites and bacteria this trend was not significant. For plants and nematodes, the diversity of rare species decreased more strongly (response ratio < -1) than for bacteria, fungi, protists, springtails and mites (response ratio between -0.1 and -0.6 (Figure 4).