Soil Fauna Dynamics and Ecosystem Functionality

Soil fauna—including microfauna, mesofauna and macrofauna—drive key ecosystem processes by decomposing organic matter, cycling nutrients and structuring soil architecture. Through feeding, burrowing and excretion, these organisms regulate carbon sequestration, soil porosity and water infiltration, thereby underpinning plant growth and aboveground biodiversity. Interactions among detritivores, predators and microorganisms form complex food webs that channel energy and nutrients across trophic levels. Spatial heterogeneity in soil texture, moisture and pore structure shapes faunal distributions and trophic encounters, while land‐use change and climate warming alter community composition and functional resilience. Recent methodological advances, such as stable‐isotope and molecular gut‐content analyses, have revealed multichannel feeding and hidden trophic links, challenging classical resource‐based models. Global assessments highlight vast but uneven biomass of soil arthropods and earthworms, illustrating that belowground communities respond dynamically to environmental gradients. Integrative, quantitative frameworks that couple biophysical soil properties with multifunctional classifications of soil fauna are essential to predict how biodiversity loss and environmental change will impact ecosystem services on regional to planetary scales.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies in tropical landscapes reveal profound shifts in energy allocation within aboveground and belowground food webs following forest conversion. In undisturbed rainforest, over 90% of animal energy flux is channelled through canopy and soil arthropods, whereas in oil palm and rubber plantations more than half of energy is directed to earthworms. Land‐use intensification reduces multitrophic energy transfer to higher trophic levels by up to 90% and shifts decomposition from slow fungal pathways to fast bacterial channels, coinciding with soil carbon decline. Another global assessment of springtails demonstrates that despite a 20‐fold variation in biomass between tundra and tropics, community metabolism remains invariant with latitude. Neither density nor energy use correlates with species richness, suggesting thermal and resource constraints rather than diversity per se shape metabolic fluxes. These findings underline the resilience and vulnerability of belowground communities under changing climates and land uses.

Research from all publishers

A comprehensive review of soil‐associated consumers integrates feeding habits across protists, invertebrates and vertebrates into a unified multifunctional framework. Using molecular, biochemical and isotopic evidence, this synthesis reveals widespread omnivory, multichannel feeding and niche differentiation among detritivores and predators. The proposed classification links traits such as resource preference, body mass and microhabitat specialisation to ecosystem functions, enhancing the realism of soil food‐web models and providing a reference for biodiversity–function studies. Building on this, a novel multichannel food‐web reconstruction approach combines trophic guild assignments, prey protection traits, spatial overlaps and biomass‐dependent feeding to calculate energy fluxes under steady‐state assumptions. Derived indicators quantify trophic multifunctionality—including herbivory, top‐down control and organic‐matter transformation—and enable comparison of soil communities across ecosystems. This method offers a robust tool for linking biodiversity patterns to ecosystem processes in soils and beyond.

Soil Fauna Dynamics and Ecosystem Functionality publication trend

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

Technical terms

Detritivore: An organism that feeds on dead organic matter, facilitating decomposition and nutrient release.

Trophic guild: A group of species that exploit the same class of resources in a similar manner within a food web.

Energy flux: The rate at which energy is transferred between trophic levels through consumption and metabolic processes.

Soil food web: The network of feeding relationships among soil organisms, from microorganisms to predators, that governs decomposition and nutrient cycling.

Multichannel feeding: The utilisation of multiple resource pathways or food types by a single consumer, reflecting omnivory and niche flexibility.

References

1. Rainforest transformation reallocates energy from green to brown food webs. Nature (2024).
2. Globally invariant metabolism but density-diversity mismatch in springtails. Nature Communications (2023).
3. Feeding habits and multifunctional classification of soil‐associated consumers from protists to vertebrates. Biological Reviews (2022).
4. Multifunctionality of belowground food webs: resource, size and spatial energy channels. Biological Reviews (2022).
5. Soil fauna and soil functions: a jigsaw puzzle. Frontiers in Environmental Science (2014).
6. The physical structure of soil: Determinant and consequence of trophic interactions. Soil Biology and Biochemistry (2020).
7. Towards an integrative understanding of soil biodiversity. Biological Reviews (2019).