Recent trends and future strategies in soil ecological research : integrative approaches at Pedobiologia

Soils are integral components of terrestrial ecosystems. Soils not only harbour a significant proportion of Earth's biodiversity (the poor man's tropical rain forest; Giller 1996) and processes, but also represent important carbon sinks and sources in a changing world (Reichstein et al. 2013). Understanding of interactions amongst soil organisms as well as with their environment, therefore, is essential to predict how terrestrial ecosystems respond to anthropogenic global change processes. In order to comprehend the complexity of soils and their organisms, integrative and synthesising approaches are urgently needed. Pedobiologia has a long-standing history of publishing articles in the field of soil ecology, spanning the gradient from more descriptive work to experimental approaches, syntheses, and meta-analyses.