“The global soil community and its influence on biogeochemistry” (2019), by Thomas Ward Crowther et al. Agriculture and Biology research paper. Original abstract below, unchanged. No free PDF was found.

The global soil community and its influence on biogeochemistry

Thomas Ward Crowther, Johan van den Hoogen, Joe Wan et al. · August 23, 2019 · Agriculture and Biology

Abstract

Soil organisms represent the most biologically diverse community on land and govern the turnover of the largest organic matter pool in the terrestrial biosphere. The highly complex nature of these communities at local scales has traditionally obscured efforts to identify unifying patterns in global soil biodiversity and biogeochemistry. As a result, environmental covariates have generally been used as a proxy to represent the variation in soil community activity in global biogeochemical models. Yet over the past decade, broad-scale studies have begun to see past this local heterogeneity to identify unifying patterns in the biomass, diversity, and composition of certain soil groups across the globe. These unifying patterns provide new insights into the fundamental distribution and dynamics of organic matter on land.

Source page DOI: 10.1126/science.aav0550