Soil food-web control of the carbon cycle in forests across climates and mycorrhiza types

Complex consumer communities, comprising bacteria, fungi, protists and animals are an essential component of every ecosystem that actively form, change and support ecosystem functioning. In the project, we focus on quantification of the top-down control on the carbon cycle by consumers in soil across different ecosystems and climates to better understand the functional consequences of global animal biodiversity decline and change. In particular, we investigate organic matter sequestration/decomposition in forests dominated by distinct mycorrhiza types (ectomycorrhizal, EMF, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, AMF) and with different animal communities. We take soil samples in temperate forests with different textures and combine experimentation and observation in the field with controlled experiments at MyDiv and iDiv Ecotron. We then use originally-developed food-web reconstruction approach to reveal how energy channeling in soil food webs affects various aspects of ecosystem functioning. This project is funded by DFG in the framework of Emmy Noether program 2022-2028.