Response of soil biodiversity to global change

Soil systems are highly biodiverse and responsible for important ecosystem processes such as decomposition, nutrient cycling, and carbon storage. Aspects of global change, including CO2 enrichment, climate change, land use alteration, and shifts in aboveground biodiversity all have the potential to affect soil biodiversity, as well as the ecosystem-level processes that they regulate. While there is a growing body of scientific literature recognising and addressing community and ecosystem response to multiple, interacting elements of global change, soil biodiversity and soil systems are still relatively underrepresented in this literature. Yet, at the same time, soils play a major role in global carbon budgets, and therefore hold the key to understanding future climate scenarios. This special issue highlighted the current knowledge of how soil biodiversity responds to pertinent global change factors, and the ecosystem-level consequences of those changes. We received empirical and theoretical studies on land use change, nitrogen deposition, warming, elevated CO2 atmospheric concentration as well as drought and flood. Based on the contributions included, we discuss responses of global change in different soil taxonomic groups, and identify next steps.