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The complexity and transnational nature of environmental issues our societies are facing, and the need to build scientific capacity building in many regions of the world, require the establishment of global collaborative research networks that include a diverse representation of scientists from multiple geographical, cultural and socio-economical backgrounds. This topic is currently gaining relevance in the field of soil ecology, as awareness is increasing that recognizing, addressing, and predicting the changes that soils are facing requires global collaboration. However, the setup, management and operation of research networks imply multiple tasks and challenges that need to be carefully considered. While major issues related to the setup of such networks in ecology have already been described in the literature, here we focus on aspects that are important to make them truly global and inclusive. For doing so, we introduce a series of recommendations to successfully develop research networks that: i) explore ecological questions requiring data with a global coverage and ii) foster the participation of scientists who have been traditionally underrepresented in international research collaborations. These recommendations, which are based on our own experience, also provide practical advice to anyone aiming to initiate (or join) a global collaborative research network to the mutual benefit of all contributors. ; This project received support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreements no 647038 to F.T.M. and 677232 to N.E.). Further support came from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, funded by the DFG (FZT 118). F.T.M. acknowledges support from a sabbatical fellowship provided by sDiv, the synthesis center of iDiv, and from Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041). The Jena Experiment is funded by the German Research Foundation (FOR 1451; FOR 5000).

Global change poses increasing threats to ecological communities and ecosystem functioning. To improve our understanding of how arthropod communities, and associated ecosystem functions respond to combined impacts of future climate change and land-use intensification in grassland ecosystems, I used the experimental set-up of the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF). In my first chapter, I studied the combined effects of climate change and land-use intensity on arthropod community composition at the whole community level and of four trophic groups (predators, herbivores, detritivores and omnivores). I found that climate change and land-use intensification simultaneously shift species composition across trophic levels, through changes in abundance, species richness, and evenness. In my second chapter, I present a comprehensive set of linear regressions to estimate live body mass using data on body length and width, taxonomy and geographic origin. Furthermore, I quantified prediction discrepancy when using parameters from arthropods of a different geographic region. Incorporating body width into taxon- and region-specific length-mass regressions substantially increased prediction accuracy for live body mass. In my third research chapter, I studied the impacts of future climate change and land-use intensification on ecosystem functioning and the stability of arthropod food-webs. I furthermore studied the response of underlying community characteristics driving these ecosystem processes. Specifically, I tested the response of mean body mass, biomass and community metabolism of the whole community and four trophic groups to climate change and land-use intensification. Despite changes in community characteristics of the trophic groups, community ecosystem processes and food-web stability remained stable under climate change and land-use intensification, while the composition of total ecosystem processes changed.

Aim: Soil microbes are essential for maintenance of life‐supporting ecosystem services, but projections of how these microbes will be affected by global change scenarios are lacking. Therefore, our aim was to provide projections of future soil microbial distribution using several scenarios of global change. Location: Global. Time period: 1950–2090. Major taxa studied: Bacteria and fungi. Methods: We used a global database of soil microbial communities across six continents to estimate past and future trends of the soil microbiome. To do so, we used structural equation models to include the direct and indirect effects of changes in climate and land use in our predictions, using current climate (temperature and precipitation) and land‐use projections between 1950 and 2090. Results: Local bacterial richness will increase in all scenarios of change in climate and land use considered, although this increase will be followed by a generalized community homogenization process affecting > 85% of terrestrial ecosystems. Changes in the relative abundance of functional genes associated with the increases in bacterial richness are also expected. Based on an ecological cluster analysis, our results suggest that phylotypes such as Geodermatophilus spp. (typical desert bacteria), Mycobacterium sp. (which are known to include important human pathogens), Streptomyces mirabilis (major producers of antibiotic resistance genes) or potential fungal soil‐borne plant pathogens belonging to Ascomycota fungi (Venturia spp., Devriesia spp.) will become more abundant in their communities. Main conclusions: Our results provide evidence that climate change has a stronger influence on soil microbial communities than change in land use (often including deforestation and agricultural expansion), although most of the effects of climate are indirect, through other environmental variables (e.g., changes in soil pH). The same was found for microbial functions such as the prevalence of phosphate transport genes. We provide reliable predictions about the changes in the global distribution of microbial communities, showing an increase in alpha diversity and a homogenization of soil microbial communities in the Anthropocene. ; This manuscript was developed from discussions within the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG FZT118). C.A.G. and N.E. acknowledge funding by iDiv (DFG FZT118) Flexpool proposals 34600850 and 34600844. N.E. acknowledges funding by the DFG (FOR 1451) and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 677232). E.D. acknowledges funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG GRK 2297 –314838170), MathCoRe. M.D.-B. acknowledges support from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions of the Horizon 2020 Framework Program H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 under REA grant agreement number 702057. F.T.M. acknowledges support from the European Research Council grant agreement number 647038 (BIODESERT).

The loss of biodiversity is negatively affecting ecosystem functions and biotic interactions. However, it is those biotic interactions that are essential for ecosystem fitness, productivity, and resilience. In terrestrial ecosystems, the multitrophic above-belowground interactions among plants, their soil biota, and the aboveground herbivore community drive many important ecosystem processes. While we know of the close connections between plants and their soil biota community or plants and their herbivore community, we still lack the mechanistic understanding underlying these biotic interactions. It is here that the newly emerging research area of ecological metabolomics (eco-metabolomics) may provide new insights by uncovering the molecular processes of plant-soil-herbivore interactions. My dissertation aimed to provide insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying plant-soil-herbivore interaction by combining the application of eco-metabolomics with biodiversity experiments. I combined controlled pot experiments with a field experiment in a semi-natural grassland to test whether different levels of plant diversity and soil biota diversity affect plant metabolomes. Furthermore, I tested if these changes in plant metabolomes and the diversity of secondary metabolites can be linked to aboveground herbivory to explain variation therein. My dissertation provides experimental evidence that plant diversity can induce shifts in soil biota diversity that can affect the plant's metabolome as well as the concentration and diversity of secondary metabolites. In addition, my results suggest that the plant's metabolome is a novel and important functional trait that can link plant diversity and herbivory, and explain variation thereof. By including metabolomic analyses, we gained a better understanding for the importance of plant-soil interactions in shaping ecosystem processes, such as aboveground plant-herbivore interactions, via their effect on the plant's metabolome.

The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer‐reviewed articles over a twenty‐two‐year time period (1990–2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co‐occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity‐related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years. ; Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2019 ; peerReviewed

11 páginas, 4 figuras y 3 tablas. ; Plants form mutualistic relationship with a variety of belowground fungal species. Such a mutualistic relationship can enhance plant growth and resistance to pathogens. Yet, we know little about how interactions between functionally diverse groups of fungal mutualists affect plant performance and competition. We experimentally determined the effects of interaction between two functional groups of belowground fungi that form mutualistic relationship with plants, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and Trichoderma, on interspecific competition between pairs of closely related plant species from four different genera. We hypothesized that the combination of two functionally diverse belowground fungal species would allow plants and fungi to partition their symbiotic relationships and relax plant–plant competition. Our results show that: 1) the AM fungal species consistently outcompeted the Trichoderma species independent of plant combinations; 2) the fungal species generally had limited effects on competitive interactions between plants; 3) however, the combination of fungal species relaxed interspecific competition in one of the four instances of plant–plant competition, despite the general competitive superiority of AM fungi over Trichoderma. We highlight that the competitive outcome between functionally diverse fungal species may show high consistency across a broad range of host plants and their combinations. However, despite this consistent competitive hierarchy, the consequences of their interaction for plant performance and competition can strongly vary among plant communities. ; MPT acknowledges funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG, TH 2307/1‐1). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 765290. AMM, NMvD and AB further acknowledge the COST Action FA1405. AM acknowledges funding from the program for attracting talent to Salamanca from Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura y Saberes. Further support came from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle–Jena–Leipzig, funded by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118). Author contributions ‐ MPT conceived the idea. MPT, NvD, NE, CR and AM‐M developed the ideas for the experiment. VQ, MPT and AM‐M performed the experiment. MPT analyzed the data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revisions. ; Peer reviewed

Biological invasions pose a serious threat to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across ecosystems. Invasions by ecosystem engineers, in particular, have been shown to have dramatic effects in recipient ecosystems. For instance, invasion by earthworms, a below-ground invertebrate ecosystem engineer, in previously earthworm-free ecosystems alters the physico-chemical characteristics of the soil. Studies have shown that such alterations in the soil can have far-reaching impacts on soil organisms, which form a major portion of terrestrial biodiversity. Here, we present the first quantitative synthesis of earthworm invasion effects on soil micro-organisms and soil invertebrates based on 430 observations from 30 independent studies. Our meta-analysis shows a significant decline of the diversity and density of soil invertebrates in response to earthworm invasion with anecic and endogeic earthworms causing the strongest effects. Earthworm invasion effects on soil micro-organisms were context-dependent, such as depending on functional group richness of invasive earthworms and soil depth. Microbial biomass and diversity increased in mineral soil layers, with a weak negative effect in organic soil layers, indicating that the mixing of soil layers by earthworms (bioturbation) may homogenize microbial communities across soil layers. Our meta-analysis provides a compelling evidence for negative effects of a common invasive below-ground ecosystem engineer on below-ground biodiversity of recipient ecosystems, which could potentially alter the ecosystem functions and services linked to soil biota. ; European Union's Horizon 2020, Grant/ Award Number: 677232; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; German Research Foundation, Grant/Award Number: FZT 118

Understanding the present and future distribution of soil-borne plant pathogens is critical to supporting food and fibre production in a warmer world. Using data from a global field survey and a nine-year field experiment, we show that warmer temperatures increase the relative abundance of soil-borne potential fungal plant pathogens. Moreover, we provide a global atlas of these organisms along with future distribution projections under different climate change and land-use scenarios. These projections show an overall increase in the relative abundance of potential plant pathogens worldwide. This work advances our understanding of the global distribution of potential fungal plant pathogens and their sensitivity to ongoing climate and land-use changes, which is fundamental to reduce their incidence and impacts on terrestrial ecosystems globally. ; This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 702057 and the European Research Council (ERC) grant agreements no. 242658 (BIOCOM) and no. 647038 (BIODESERT). M.D.-B. is supported by a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Government (agreement no. RYC2018-025483-I) and a MUSGONET grant (LRA17\1193) from the British Ecological Society. F.T.M. also acknowledges funding from Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041) and from sDiv, the synthesis centre of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle–Jena–Leipzig (iDiv). Work on microbial distribution and colonization in the B.K.S. laboratory is funded by the Australian Research Council (DP190103714). B.K.S. also acknowledges a research award by the Humboldt Foundation. C.A.G. and N.E. acknowledge support from iDiv, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG FZT118) through flexpool proposals 34600850 and 34600844. N.E. also acknowledges support from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 677232).

14 páginas, 3 figuras, 2 tablas ; Research aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying the relationship between tree diversity and antagonist infestation is often neglecting resource-use complementarity among plant species. We investigated the effects of tree species identity, species richness, and mycorrhizal type on leaf herbivory and pathogen infestation. We used a tree sapling experiment manipulating the two most common mycorrhizal types, arbuscular mycorrhiza and ectomycorrhiza, via respective tree species in monocultures and two-species mixtures. We visually assessed leaf herbivory and pathogen infestation rates, and measured concentrations of a suite of plant metabolites (amino acids, sugars, and phenolics), leaf elemental concentrations (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus), and tree biomass. Tree species and mycorrhizal richness had no significant effect on herbivory and pathogen infestation, whereas species identity and mycorrhizal type had. Damage rates were higher in arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) than in ectomycorrhizal (EM) trees. Our structural equation model (SEM) indicated that elemental, but not metabolite concentrations, determined herbivory and pathogen infestation, suggesting that the investigated chemical defence strategies may not have been involved in the effects found in our study with tree saplings. Other chemical and physical defence strategies as well as species identity as its determinant may have played a more crucial role in the studied saplings. Furthermore, the SEM indicated a direct positive effect of AM trees on herbivory rates, suggesting that other dominant mechanisms, not considered here, were involved as well. We found differences in the attribution of elemental concentrations between the two rates. This points to the fact that herbivory and pathogen infestation are driven by distinct mechanisms. Our study highlights the importance of biotic contexts for understanding the mechanisms underlying the effects of biodiversity on tree-antagonist interactions. ; We thank Nicole M. van Dam, Henriette Uthe, Fredd Vergara, Martin Volf, and Alexander Weinhold for their valuable advice on metabolite analyses as well as Beate Rothe and Michael Reichelt for their help with chemical analyses. Moreover, comments by two anonymous reviewers helped to improve the paper. This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 677232). Further support came from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig and the EcoMetEoR platform, funded by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118). AMM acknowledges support from the program for attracting talent to Salamanca from Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura y Saberes and Ayuntamiento de Salamanca. ; Peer reviewed

1. Making agriculture sustainable is a global challenge. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing with respect to biodiversity, climate, soil, land degradation as well as socio-economic challenges. 2. The European Commission's proposal for a CAP post-2020 provides a scope for enhanced sustainability. However, it also allows Member States to choose low-ambition implementation pathways. It therefore remains essential to address citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture and rectify systemic weaknesses in the CAP, using the full breadth of available scientific evidence and knowledge. 3. Concerned about current attempts to dilute the environmental ambition of the future CAP, and the lack of concrete proposals for improving the CAP in the draft of the European Green Deal, we call on the European Parliament, Council and Commission to adopt 10 urgent action points for delivering sustainable food production, biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation. 4. Knowledge is available to help moving towards evidence-based, sustainable European agriculture that can benefit people, nature and their joint futures. 5. The statements made in this article have the broad support of the scientific community, as expressed by above 3,600 signatories to the preprint version of this manuscript. The list can be found here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3685632).

Making agriculture sustainable is a global challenge. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing with respect to biodiversity, climate, soil, land degradation as well as socio-economic challenges especially in rural areas. The European Commission's proposal for a CAP post-2020 allows Member States to choose low-ambition implementation. With a new Parliament and Commission in place, the reform process has now restarted. It is therefore time to act on urgent challenges and address citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture, using the full breadth of available scientific evidence and knowledge. Concerned about attempts to dilute the environmental ambition of the future CAP, we call on the European Parliament, the EU's Member States and the European Commission to adopt ten urgent action points for delivering sustainable food production, biodiversity conservation, and climate mitigation towards an evidence-based, future-proof European agriculture. The ; This version of the paper has been made publically available for signatories to support, from 4.11.2019 until 19.2.2020. The final version is available as a paper in People and Nature.

Abstract Making agriculture sustainable is a global challenge. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing with respect to biodiversity, climate, soil, land degradation as well as socio-economic challenges. The European Commission's proposal for a CAP post-2020 provides a scope for enhanced sustainability. However, it also allows Member States to choose low-ambition implementation pathways. It therefore remains essential to address citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture and rectify systemic weaknesses in the CAP, using the full breadth of available scientific evidence and knowledge. Concerned about current attempts to dilute the environmental ambition of the future CAP, and the lack of concrete proposals for improving the CAP in the draft of the European Green Deal, we call on the European Parliament, Council and Commission to adopt 10 urgent action points for delivering sustainable food production, biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation. Knowledge is available to help moving towards evidence-based, sustainable European agriculture that can benefit people, nature and their joint futures. The statements made in this article have the broad support of the scientific community, as expressed by above 3,600 signatories to the preprint version of this manuscript. The list can be found here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3685632). A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. ; Peer reviewed

Soils harbor a substantial fraction of the world's biodiversity, contributing to many crucial ecosystem functions. It is thus essential to identify general macroecological patterns related to the distribution and functioning of soil organisms to support their conservation and consideration by governance. These macroecological analyses need to represent the diversity of environmental conditions that can be found worldwide. Here we identify and characterize existing environmental gaps in soil taxa and ecosystem functioning data across soil macroecological studies and 17,186 sampling sites across the globe. These data gaps include important spatial, environmental, taxonomic, and functional gaps, and an almost complete absence of temporally explicit data. We also identify the limitations of soil macroecological studies to explore general patterns in soil biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships, with only 0.3% of all sampling sites having both information about biodiversity and function, although with different taxonomic groups and functions at each site. Based on this information, we provide clear priorities to support and expand soil macroecological research. ; The German Research Foundation, iDiv, the DFG and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Open access funding provided by Projekt DEAL. ; http://www.nature.com/naturecommunications ; am2021 ; Biochemistry ; Genetics ; Microbiology and Plant Pathology

Soils harbor a substantial fraction of the world's biodiversity, contributing to many crucial ecosystem functions. It is thus essential to identify general macroecological patterns related to the distribution and functioning of soil organisms to support their conservation and consideration by governance. These macroecological analyses need to represent the diversity of environmental conditions that can be found worldwide. Here we identify and characterize existing environmental gaps in soil taxa and ecosystem functioning data across soil macroecological studies and 17,186 sampling sites across the globe. These data gaps include important spatial, environmental, taxonomic, and functional gaps, and an almost complete absence of temporally explicit data. We also identify the limitations of soil macroecological studies to explore general patterns in soil biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships, with only 0.3% of all sampling sites having both information about biodiversity and function, although with different taxonomic groups and functions at each site. Based on this information, we provide clear priorities to support and expand soil macroecological research. ; This manuscript developed from discussions within the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG FZT118). CAG and NE acknowledge funding by iDiv (DFG FZT118) Flexpool proposal 34600850. C.A.G., A.H.B., J.S., A.C., N.G.R., S.C., L.B., M.C.R., F.B., J.O., G.P., H.R.P.P., M.W., T.W., K.K., and N.E. acknowledge funding by iDiv (DFG FZT118) Flexpool proposal 34600844. N.E. acknowledges funding by the DFG (FOR 1451) and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 677232). Finally we would like to acknowledge the contribution of all the authors that provided their datasets for analysis within this paper. Open access funding provided by Projekt DEAL.

Soil is one of the most biodiverse terrestrial habitats. Yet, we lack an integrative conceptual framework for understanding the patterns and mechanisms driving soil biodiversity. One of the underlying reasons for our poor understanding of soil biodiversity patterns relates to whether key biodiversity theories (historically developed for aboveground and aquatic organisms) are applicable to patterns of soil biodiversity. Here, we present a systematic literature review to investigate whether and how key biodiversity theories (species-energy relationship, theory of island biogeography, metacommunity theory, niche theory and neutral theory) can explain observed patterns of soil biodiversity. We then discuss two spatial compartments nested within soil at which biodiversity theories can be applied to acknowledge the scale-dependent nature of soil biodiversity. ; Published version ; M.P.T. acknowledges funding from the GermanResearch Foundation (DFG, TH 2307/1-1). H.R.P.P.was supported by the sDiv (DFG FZT 118). M.L.was supported by the TULIP Laboratory of Excellence(ANR-10-LABX-41). M.C.R. and W.H.V.d.P. acknowledgesupport from ERC Advanced Grants [grant number:ERC-ADV 694368 and ERC-ADV 323020 (SPECIALS),respectively]. F.T.D.V. is supported by a BBSRC DavidPhillips Fellowship (BB/L02456X/1). N.E. and O.F.acknowledge funding by the European Research Council(ERC Starting Grant 677232, ECOWORM). C.A.G. issupported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 researchand innovation programme under grant agreement No641762-ECOPOTENTIAL. E.K.C. acknowledges fundingfrom the Academy of Finland (285882) and the NaturalSciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada(postdoctoral fellowship 471903 and RGPIN-2019-05758).