Professor Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado, United States
Soil biodiversity is essential for healthy soils that our life depends on. Scientists have well established that soil biodiversity is degraded by global challenges such as land use intensification, climate change, pollution, and mining, affecting benefits such as food production, animal, plant and human health, clean water and storage of carbon. A new urgent challenge is protection of soils in all ecosystems in a holistic manner incorporating the integration of biological, physical and chemical parts of soil health (see EU Soil Health Dashboard on Healthy Soils https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/esdacviewer/euso-dashboard/).
How will this happen? This approach to soil biodiversity should include scientists and policymakers around the world to collectively work and encourage interaction towards protection of soils that will sustain future ecosystem benefits such as sustainable food production and soil carbon storage. Soil biodiversity scientists are currently involved in numerous disciplinary collaborations, and coordinated volunteer networks, standardized transdisciplinary experiments and integration of complex data on land use, climate change and other challenges. Rather than a fractured approach soil biodiversity science will advance because we are already acting as a global community to address challenges at regional and global scales and are adapting towards a new, hopefully inclusive (geographies, gender, DEIJ) multi -disciplinary soil biodiversity science. To continue these achievements, disciplines of soil biodiversity science must not splinter but must unite through in person and virtual meetings to share evidence and ensure cross talk of successes and failures. In this ESA session, speakers unite to provide perspectives on how soil biodiversity science can advance globally and the gaps to address. These include; prediction of change in soil biodiversity (Bennett); expansion of knowledge on soil biodiversity (Byrne); integrating soil carbon and microbes (Grandy); institutional barriers to international collaborations for early career scientists (Schaedel); and future needs in soil carbon cycling (Gross). It is collaborative meetings such as this focused on global soil biodiversity science where we together share our evidence and consider challenges that will advance not only soil biodiversity sciences, but all earth and biological system sciences.
