Project description
Soil’s hidden role in carbon storage
Soil animals play a crucial role in shaping food webs, influencing microbial activity, detritus decomposition, and soil structure. Despite their importance, their impact on global carbon cycles remains largely unquantified. With this in mind, the ERC-funded CARBONWEB project aims to fill this gap by studying how soil food webs regulate carbon stabilisation across diverse ecosystems. Using global soil animal monitoring, isotopic experiments, AI-driven analysis, and food web modelling, CARBONWEB will assess how climate factors like temperature and precipitation affect soil biodiversity and energy fluxes. The project’s findings will provide the first global estimate of soil food web contributions to carbon storage, supporting long-term biodiversity monitoring and informing strategies for climate resilience and sustainable land management.
Objective
Soil food webs process 90% of the terrestrial primary production and regulate the second largest carbon pool on Earth soil organic matter. Soil food webs themselves are regulated by soil animals through changes in microbial functioning, detritus quality, and physical soil structure. However, neither drivers of soil food web structure and functions nor their effects on global biogeochemistry and carbon stabilisation are quantified across large environmental gradients. CARBONWEB addresses this challenge at the global scale and tests the following Key Hypotheses: (A) biotic controls of soil food web structure and functions increase under conditions promoting biological activity and nutrient limitation; (B) consumption of detritus by consumers in soil food webs increases the stable fraction of soil carbon across ecosystem types; (C) the effect of soil animals on multiple ecosystem functions increases with temperature, precipitation, and nutrient limitation, proportionally to the total energy flux in soil food webs; (D) the global net effect of soil animals on topsoil carbon is positive (>10% increase) and will increase with climate warming. To test my hypotheses, I will use (1) the first comprehensive global monitoring of soil animal communities in the framework of Soil BON, (2) an EU-wide survey and isotopic experiments on carbon stabilisation, (3) steady-state and dynamic food web modelling and AI-based animal image analysis approaches, and (4) geospatial extrapolations. My experience in soil macroecology, functional ecology, large-scale project coordination, and the established collaborative network will help to ensure this project is successful. I will describe and mechanistically model the status and trends of energy fluxes, animal biodiversity, and carbon pools in global topsoils. Results of the project will provide the first-ever global estimation of soil food web effects on soil functioning and facilitate long-term monitoring of soil biodiversity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences geochemistry biogeochemistry
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
60325 FRANKFURT
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.