BIOservicES

Background

Most biodiversity on Earth resides below our feet in soils. This soil biodiversity underlies major human-needed functions such as controlling plant growth and the cycling of elements. With our management, we often try to make ourselves less dependent on these organisms, but at a cost of threatening soil biodiversity. While having basic insights into the coarse functional importance of soil biodiversity as a whole in a few specific systems like agricultural fields, we mostly lack information on the actual drivers of the respective functions across the wide diversity of life in soil, especially in different land uses. Also how different management forms affect complex soil communities remains unknown.

Project description

While BIOservicES mainly aims to fill knowledge gaps on the entity of soil biodiversity and its links with ecosystem functions and services, at Nematology we focus mostly on protists. More specifically, we investigate protists in soils with different land uses across Europe. Subsequently, we will link protist data to that of other organism groups, functions and services to predict the importance of all organism groups to a given function or service. We also investigate the impact different land use has on protist communities. Together, our work will help identifying threats to soil biodiversity and underlying agents of key functions and services, which will guide optimized management practices.