Looking Up and Out as Well as Down and In in Soil Microbial Ecology.

The last 30 years of research in Soil Biology & Biochemistry have been exciting and transformative as new molecular tools have revolutionized our ability to characterize microbial communities and new isotope and other measurement techniques have improved our ability to measure process rates.  Still, we have been unable to meet some of the greatest challenges of our time, e.g., the response of soil organic matter pools and nutrient availability to global climate change or the links between community composition and biodiversity and function.  I argue that meeting these challenges requires designing experiments, collecting data and interpreting results at multiple scales of investigation and with multiple disciplines.  I will illustrate this point with results from studies on soil fauna and soil carbon dynamics, nitrogen cycling response to winter and summer climate change, and ecosystem carbon and nitrogen response to deacidification.  If we are able to apply our new detailed techniques in broad spatial and disciplinary contexts that consider ecological, physical and chemical contexts the next 30 years of Soil Biology & Biochemistry are likely to be even more exciting and transformative than the last 30 years.