Accepted Article This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/ecy.1794 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Received Date : 15-Nov-2016 Revised Date : 16-Feb-2017 Accepted Date : 24-Feb-2017 Article type : Articles Predator community composition is linked to soil carbon retention across a human land use gradient OSWALD J. SCHMITZ 1 , ROBERT W. BUCHKOWSKI, JEFFREY R. SMITH 2 , MARK TELTHORST 3 , ADAM E. ROSENBLATT School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, 370 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511 2 Jeffrey R. Smith: Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 jrsmith7@stanford.edu 3 Mark Telthorst: 20 Country Creek Ct. Ballwin, MO 63011 telt09@gmail.com Running title: Predators and soil carbon 1 E-mail: oswald.schmitz@yale.edu Abstract. Soil carbon (C) storage is a major component of the carbon cycle. Consensus holds that soil C uptake and storage is regulated by plant-microbe-soil interactions. However, the contribution of animals in aboveground food webs to this process has been overlooked. Using insights from prior long-term experimentation in an old-field ecosystem and mathematical modeling, we predicted that the amount of soil C retention within a field should increase with the proportion of active hunting predators comprising the aboveground community of active hunting