About this Research Topic

Background

Soil fauna plays an important role in maintaining soil quality and health, providing ecosystem services through processes such as organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling, soil structure, and, consequently, hydrology alteration, resource availability regulation, and pest suppression. Therefore, the direct and indirect impacts of mesofauna on SOM dynamics are critical to understanding carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions in the context of global carbon cycling models.

Moreover, some mesofauna groups are shown to be highly sensitive to changes in soil quality, so they are particularly affected by changes in soil microhabitat, often related to management practices leading to the alteration of both soil physical and chemical qualities. Since the activity and interactions of soil organisms are intimately tied to multiple processes that ecosystems and society rely on, soil fauna should be considered in land management assessments, to improve sustainable land practices and restoration projects.

Human activity is the main cause of ecosystem modifications, contributing substantially to climate change, and leading to deep changes in soil properties and quality. Urbanization, non-sustainable agricultural practices, forest plantation and management come out as important drivers of species decline and, together with climate change, mesofauna biodiversity loss. Specifically, arthropods and earthworms perform ecosystem services that directly and indirectly benefit human well-being, so they must be included in soil management decisions.

Understanding the impacts of soil management practices on the relationships between mesofauna and ecological function is of critical importance to the future sustainability of production systems. Indeed, long-term changes in weather conditions (e.g., mean temperatures and rainfall), which are expected to have severe impacts on food security and availability, link with, and may be compounded by, local and regional land management practices. Those changes, influencing soil biophysical factors, alter biodiversity, with a subsequent decline in ecosystem functioning and agricultural production. Moreover, mesofauna can play the dual role of supporters and bioindicators of soil quality conditions. Assessment of the drivers affecting soil fauna community dynamics and setting up well-informed site management plans will be essential to sustain soil arthropods’ biodiversity (and the ecosystem services it provides) and therefore mitigate climate change effects.

This Research Topic aims to present a collection of original articles and reviews that address the interconnections between ecosystem management plans and soil fauna community. We also welcome original research that improves our understanding of the co-benefits from synergistic mitigation efforts or develops assessment tools to optimize the decision-making process for agricultural and forestry good practices and recovery projects. Topics to be covered include but are not limited to the following:

• Crop designing approaches providing comprehensive information for managing productive agro-ecosystem with healthy soil concept, linking with crop yield

• Linking mesofauna biodiversity and its ecosystem functions in the land-use context, as a relevant tool for land planning and farmers

• Understand the effects of management practices on mesofauna in areas affected by disasters

• Forestry supporting soil fauna and linked to SOM turnover and climate change mitigation

• Soil restoration practices against biotic homogenization in urban soils

• Identification of the most important mesofauna bioindicators of ecosystem stability

Keywords: soil quality; land management; restoration; climate change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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