Soil microbial diversity plays an important role in resisting and restoring degraded ecosystems

Background: Land degradation and climate change pose serious threats to global biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services. The key role of plant diversity in resisting the negative impacts of disturbances and restoring degraded ecosystems has been well documented. Recent evidence has also highlighted the critical roles of soil microbial diversity. However, mechanistic knowledge and field evidence of soil biodiversity in restoration remain limited. Developing an improved understanding of how soil biodiversity responds and resists to environmental disturbances, particularly the combined effects of multiple disturbances, can provide critical mechanistic knowledge to develop effective restoration tools. Scope: In this article, we provide a brief overview of recent advancements in our understanding of the impacts of land degradation and climate change on soil microbial diversity and ecosystem functions and services. Further, we identify the main knowledge gaps, propose new concepts, and make recommendations for future research directions. Specifically, we propose a new concept that combine multiple ecological theories (e.g., meta-community, invasion, and coalescence) and suggest that both plant and soil biodiversity, as well as their interactions, be explicitly considered to improve mechanistic understanding of the resistance and resilience of ecosystems to increasing disturbances. Adopting a framework that combines both plant and soil biodiversity approaches is likely provide improved ecosystem restoration outcomes. Conclusions: We advocate for a systems-based approach to ecosystem restoration that integrates biological approaches with environmental variables (e.g., ecosystem properties, climatic conditions, and soil types). To support this approach, we propose the integration of new computational and satellite tools that have the potential to facilitate the implementation of better management, monitoring, and restoration of ecosystems.