Tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, but it is not well understood how this diversity is structured and maintained. One hypothesis rests on the generation of a range of metabolic niches, with varied composition, supporting a high species diversity. Characterizing soil metabolomes can reveal fine-scale differences in composition and potentially help explain variation across these habitats. In particular, little is known about canopy soils, which are unique habitats that are likely to be sources of additional biodiversity and biogeochemical cycling in tropical forests. We studied the effects of diverse tree species and epiphytes on soil metabolomic profiles of forest floor and canopy suspended soils in a French Guianese rainforest. We found that the metabolomic profiles of canopy suspended soils were distinct from those of forest floor soils, differing between epiphyte-associated and non-epiphyte suspended soils, and the metabolomic profiles of suspended soils varied with host tree species, regardless of association with epiphyte. Thus, tree species is a key driver of rainforest suspended soil metabolomics. We found greater abundance of metabolites in suspended soils, particularly in groups associated with plants, such as phenolic compounds, and with metabolic pathways related to amino acids, nucleotides, and energy metabolism, due to the greater relative proportion of tree and epiphyte organic material derived from litter and root exudates, indicating a strong legacy of parent biological material. Our study provides evidence for the role of tree and epiphyte species in canopy soil metabolomic composition and in maintaining the high levels of soil metabolome diversity in this tropical rainforest. It is likely that a wide array of canopy microsite-level environmental conditions, which reflect interactions between trees and epiphytes, increase the microscale diversity in suspended soil metabolomes.

AMAP University Montpellier CIRAD CNRS INRAE IRD 34000 Montpellier France

Centre for Ecology and Conservation University of Exeter Penryn TR10 9FE UK

Centre of Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science University of Vienna Althanstrasse 14 1090 Vienna Austria

CREAF Cerdanyola del Vallès 08193 Catalonia Spain

Department of Biology University of Antwerp BE 2610 Wilrijk Belgium

Department of Zoology College of Science King Saud University P O Box 2455 Riyadh 11451 Saudi Arabia

ECOFOG CNRS CIRAD AgroParisTech INRAE Université des Antilles Université de Guyane 97310 Kourou France

Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences The Czech Academy of Sciences Bělidla 986 4a CZ 60300 Brno Czech Republic

Global Ecology Unit CREAF CSIC UAB Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Bellaterra 08193 Catalonia Spain

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