Ecology

Biology

Soil biology

Soil organic matter

Earth science

Geology

Soil water

Biogeochemical cycle

Biogeochemistry

Geography

Soil biodiversity

Environmental science

Soil science

Land use

Invertebrate

Biosphere

Biodiversity

Science

Soil organisms represent the most biologically diverse community on land and govern the turnover of the largest organic matter pool in the terrestrial biosphere. The highly complex nature of these communities at local scales has traditionally obscured efforts to identify unifying patterns in global soil biodiversity and biogeochemistry. As a result, environmental covariates have generally been used as a proxy to represent the variation in soil community activity in global biogeochemical models. Yet over the past decade, broad-scale studies have begun to see past this local heterogeneity to identify unifying patterns in the biomass, diversity, and composition of certain soil groups across the globe. These unifying patterns provide new insights into the fundamental distribution and dynamics of organic matter on land.

The global soil community and its influence on biogeochemistry