Burning Questions: How do soil microbes shape ecosystem biogeochemistry in the context of global change?

Earth system models disagree on the future of global soil carbon (C), with projections ranging from losses of 70 Pg to gains of 250 Pg by the year 2100 (Todd-Brown et al. 2014). This disagreement is due, in part, to the high degree of uncertainty in the mechanisms that control soil C (Sulman et al. 2018), the largest dynamic pool of organic C on Earth. It remains unclear how climate change, rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and other environmental changes will combine to affect global soil C. As key engineers of biogeochemical cycling, microbes play a crucial role in soil C responses to these environmental changes. Yet the path toward representing microbes in soil models remains uncertain. Therefore, we address four burning questions relevant for modeling microbial ecological, evolutionary, and biogeochemical processes in soils: (1) What is the role of soil microbes in biogeochemical cycling? (2) Does microbial community composition matter for soil carbon cycling? (3) Which ecological and evolutionary processes contribute to functional changes? (4) How should we model microbial eco-evolutionary mechanisms in soil C models? This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.