First meeting: 01.-04.04.2014

PIs:
Diana Wall
Kelly Ramirez

associated postdoc:
Kelly Ramirez

iDiv member:
Matthias Rillig

Project summary:
Soils contain an immense amount of biodiversity that support terrestrial ecosystems and benefit humans worldwide. The ecosystem functions controlled by soil organisms include processes like nutrient and water cycling, maintenance of soil structure, carbon sequestration, primary productivity and disease suppression. The functional role of soil organisms is linked to composition of the community, and the vast diversity of interacting organisms is controlled by a myriad of biotic and abiotic factors. Technological advancements (molecular techniques, stable isotopes, remote sensing and others) and research at global scales have advanced our ability to identify and quantify soil organisms, but the theory predicting their global distribution, both spatially and temporally, remains undeveloped. There has been a rapid influx of soil biodiversity data; yet with an estimated 10-100 million organisms in a single handful of soil, developing options for land use changes that include information such as geographic range of soil biodiversity have not been included. Here we propose a working group to establish a framework to bring together global soil biodiversity data and develop a predictive theory to improve our understanding of global distribution of soil biodiversity and the relationship to factors that controls this. The result will be an action plan to facilitate the transfer of this information for use in furthering research and establishing management plans.

Participants:
François Buscot (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ); Franciska de Vries (University of Manchester); Markus Döring (GBIF); Nico Eisenhauer (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena); Jitendra Gaikwad (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig); Ciro Gardi (Joint Research Center – EU); Joshua Ladau (Gladstone Institutes); Jonathan Leff (University of Colorado Boulder); Guillaume Lentendu (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ); Zoe Lindo (University of Western Ontario); Kelly Ramirez (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig); Matthias Rillig (Freie Universität Berlin); David Russell (Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Görlitz); Stefan Scheu (University of Goettingen); Mark St John (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada); Wubet Tesfaye (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ); Wim van der Putten (Netherlands Institute of Ecology); Diana Wall (Colorado State University)

Meeting summary
Meeting follow-up 2015