Soil Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

Soils are among the world’s most diverse habitats, hosting myriad organisms from microbes to invertebrates and even small vertebrates. This diversity underpins critical ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, water regulation and plant productivity. Microbial communities drive biogeochemical processes, transforming organic substrates into forms accessible to plants and other soil organisms. Soil fauna, including arthropods, earthworms and nematodes, fragment litter, engineer soil structure and facilitate microbial activity. Together, these biotic interactions support ecosystem services that sustain agriculture, regulate climate and maintain biodiversity aboveground. However, soil biodiversity and its functions are vulnerable to land-use change, pollution, climate alteration and multiple interacting stressors. Understanding spatial patterns, functional roles and the resilience of soil communities is vital for informing conservation, sustainable land management and policy interventions at local to global scales.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have mapped microbial diversity and potential functions across continental scales, revealing that land-use disturbance drives shifts in the balance of bacterial and fungal taxa, with intensive croplands harbouring more bacterial chemoheterotrophs and fungal pathogens but fewer beneficial symbionts than woodlands. Large-scale surveys have demonstrated that the accumulation of environmental stressors—such as nutrient imbalances, moisture extremes and pollutants—negatively correlates with multiple soil ecosystem services, and that exceeding critical thresholds for several stressors leads to marked declines in biodiversity and function worldwide. Temporal analyses of soil microbial biomass carbon show a global decrease over recent decades, particularly in high-latitude regions, driven mainly by rising temperatures; these trends have implications for carbon storage and feedbacks to climate change.

Soil Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Operational taxonomic unit (OTU): A proxy for microbial species based on DNA sequence similarity.

Ecosystem service: A benefit provided by ecological processes, such as nutrient cycling or water filtration.

Microbial biomass carbon: The mass of carbon contained within living soil microorganisms.

Beta diversity: A measure of variation in species composition between habitats or samples.

Saprotroph: An organism that obtains energy by decomposing dead organic matter.

References

1. Patterns in soil microbial diversity across Europe. Nature Communications (2023).
2. Increasing the number of stressors reduces soil ecosystem services worldwide. Nature Climate Change (2023).
3. Soil bacterial and fungal communities show within field heterogeneity that varies by land management and distance metric. Soil Biology and Biochemistry (2023).
4. Enumerating soil biodiversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2023).
5. Role of Arthropods in Maintaining Soil Fertility. Agriculture (2013).
6. Drivers and trends of global soil microbial carbon over two decades. Nature Communications (2022).