OOS 1

Weaving the Soil Biodiversity Food Web: Advancements in Understanding on a Global Scale

The Earth’s soils are living, dynamic interfaces that are habitats for millions of microbial and animal species. Soil biota are a key natural resource since their actions support soil resource availability and the delivery of major ecosystem services, from nutrient cycling to food production. Despite the numerous ecosystem services provided by the life in soil, soil biodiversity has received little international policy attention in both managed and natural systems. The goal of this session is to facilitate a discussion of soil biodiversity and ecosystem services on a global-scale and the importance of synthesizing soil biodiversity datasets across global ecosystems. The advent of new technologies allowing sequencing of species in environmental samples has greatly increased the collection of data, but has posed new challenges in synthesizing this data, including morphological data, natural history and ranges of organisms and determining the link to ecosystem services. Changes to soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are occurring, especially in the context of land use and climate change. Presentations by international experts in soil ecology, soil biodiversity education, data synthesis, ecosystem functioning and global change will provide the basis for these discussions. Examples of large-scale soil biodiversity projects will be presented. The session will showcase examples of current collaborations contributing to the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI), an international scientific effort. The GSBI is developing a coherent platform for promoting the translation of expert knowledge on soil biodiversity into environmental policy and sustainable land management for the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services.