Plant-soil feedback is the concept that is being developed in order to understand the reciprocal influences between plants and the biotic and abioic properties of soil. It is currently one of the most rapidly developing concepts in ecology, with about one quarter of all papers in the Journal of Ecology, for example, devoted to this issue. It is now known that the net effects of diverse components of the soil community that either interact with living plants (including root herbivores, pathogens, mutualists) or plant detritus (heterotrophic decomposers) can result in either positive or negative feedback affecting plant performance and persistence. It is further known that the sign and magnitude of the feedback can vary through time. Negative plant-soil feedback from accumulation of pathogens or herbivores prevents species from persisting at fixed locations or at high abundances and also promotes species co-occurrence, while positive plant-soil feedback is a mechanism for persistence or local adaptation. As such, plant-soil feedback determines plant community development during primary and secondary succession, with consequences for biodiversity maintenance, biodiversity-productivity relationships, plant rarity, and plant invasiveness. This symposium will bring together some of the most active ecologists working in this field to provide a synthetic overview of the historical perspectives, current knowledge and future research directions in plant-soil feedback. The symposium will be synthetic in several dimensions by integrating multiple spatial (from microscopic to global) and temporal scales (from ecological to evolutionary), by discussing multiple levels of ecological organization (from individuals to ecosystems) and approaches (from comparative to experimental and theoretical), and by merging traditional field methods with newly emerging computational and molecular techniques. The results of this symposium will be published in a special issue in a leading journal (currently, the Journal of Ecology is being approached), which will lead to a collection of papers that provide novel results and syntheses in this active and important field of ecological and evolutionary research.