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Organic carbon in the top layer of mineral soils in cold regions is dominated by the particulate fraction, according to analyses in Arctic and alpine ecosystems.

Environmental drivers of soil carbon and its sensitivity to warming are poorly understood. The authors compare soil samples of paired urban and natural ecosystems and show that under warming, the microbiome is an essential driver of soil carbon in urban greenspace compared with natural ecosystems.

Increased crop diversity in rotations reduces nitrogen losses relative to crop yield, making it an effective practice for sustainable farming, based on an analysis of 106 cereal fields across Europe and 56 climatic, soil, microbial, and management variables.

The authors use experimental data from 332 sites across all major global biomes to evaluate the drivers of soil microbial respiration response to warming. They demonstrate a key role of the soil microbiome, highlighting the need to account for this in assessments of soil respiration under change.

Soil carbon storage is vulnerable to various climatic and anthropogenic global change stressors (for example drought, warming, land-use intensification). Here the authors show that multiple stress factors act simultaneously to reduce soil carbon storage and persistence across global biomes.

The authors link fungal diversity to the stability of terrestrial ecosystem productivity across three global datasets, finding that richness of decomposers and mycorrhizae are positively associated with stability while the richness of plant pathogens is negatively related to stability.

Protection afforded by inorganic minerals is assumed to make mineral-associated organic carbon less susceptible to loss under climate change than particulate organic carbon. However, a global study of soil organic carbon from drylands suggests that this is not the case.

Geographic patterns in plant growth are probably influenced by soil abiotic and biotic conditions. Here, the authors assess the relationship of a composite soil health index to primary productivity and the underlying environmental predictors across major land-use types in Europe.

How arable farming affects soil fungal biogeography is poorly understood. Here, the authors find that prevalent fungal groups become more abundant, whereas rare groups become fewer or absent in arable lands across Europe, suggesting a biotic homogenization due to arable farming.

Across terrestrial and aqueous ecosystems, vertebrates increase litter decomposition, both directly and indirectly, by 6.7% on average, and this effect interacts with but generally occurs at a later stage of decomposition than the effect of invertebrates.

Soil samples collected from 224 dryland sites around the world show that aridity affects the concentration of organic carbon and total nitrogen differently from the concentration of inorganic phosphorus, suggesting that any predicted increase in aridity with climate change could uncouple the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in drylands and negatively affect the services provided by these ecosystems.

Combining field data and greenhouse experiments, the authors show how agricultural management practices like fungicide applications can affect the degree to which arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soil provision phosphorus to plants.

System-level analysis on the effects of soil biodiversity on cropping system is lacking. Across conventionally managed European fields, the proportion of time with crop cover during the past ten-year rotation has a greater impact than crop diversity on soil microbial diversity, soil multifunctionality and crop yield.

Undertaking an incubation study on soil collected from 110 dryland sites across the world, the authors show that the response of soil microbial respiration to temperature is consistent with that of adaptation to the ambient thermal regime.

Species diversity is thought to play an important role in maintaining production stability. Shi et al.demonstrate that the dominant C4 plant also makes a substantial contribution to temporal stability in a grassland ecosystem subject to 15 years of experimental warming and hay harvest.

Transition metal ions with long-lived spin states represent the minimum size magnetic bit. Here, the authors study the spin–lattice relaxation of a cobalt(II) complex and demonstrate the role of time-reversal symmetry that hinders direct spin–phonon processes regardless of the sign of the magnetic anisotropy.

Degradation of soil organic carbon is expected to accelerate with increasing global temperatures, but the magnitude of change is controversial. This Perspective discusses evidence supporting a large loss of soil organic carbon and its broader significance.

Soil organic carbon pools in productive tropical and temperate forests are more labile than those in drier colder ecosystems where mineral-protected organic carbon dominates, according to analyses of 16 long-term chronosequences from six continents.