Project description
Digging up soils to understand biodiversity change
What is the relationship between land use change, climate change and pollution? How do these interact to cause shifts in biodiversity? The EU-funded GloSoilBio project will find answers by exploring soils that harbour extremely high levels of diversity. Supporting critical ecosystem functions and services, soil biodiversity is rarely considered in large-scale syntheses examining biodiversity change. This is why it is a 'black box' in the context of global change impacts. The project will investigate how global change drivers interact to impact soil biodiversity. The findings will shed light on how different global change drivers are affecting diversity change over time. This information will benefit policymaking.
Objective
Local biodiversity is being impacted by multiple drivers of global change, including land use change, climate change, and pollution. Yet, our understanding of how these multiple drivers interact to cause shifts in biodiversity is limited, and the data that is used in large-scale synthesis analyses are often heavily biased towards taxa such as plants, birds and some marine organisms. Although soils harbour extremely high levels of diversity and this biodiversity supports critical ecosystem functions and services, soil biodiversity is very rarely considered in large-scale syntheses examining biodiversity change. As a result, it is still regarded as a ‘black box’ in the context of global change impacts. Therefore, the objectives of the GloSoilBio project are to investigate how global change drivers interact to impact soil biodiversity and understand how different global change drivers are affecting diversity change over time. The results from this project should help to inform management of global change impacts on soil biodiversity and to address EU- and global-level policy goals relating to the sustainability of life on land.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands