SPP 1374 Core 8

Soil organisms represent 25% of the global biodiversity and provide multiple and crucial ecosystem functions. Land use intensification and global change affect soil organisms in a different way than aboveground life. Among soil organisms, microorganisms are dominating in terms of both diversity and biomass, and play key roles in ecosystem multi-functionality. However, soil microorganisms are often neglected in biodiversity research and as soil health indicators until today. Over the past three decades, the diversity and functions of soil microorganisms have increasingly become accessible thanks to improvements in culture-independent molecular methods. Metabarcoding, i.e. sequencing amplicons of target regions of the ribosomal DNA region generates Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) and meanwhile allows to characterize the full diversity and composition of soil microbial communities and their answer to ecosystem variations and stress. Within the framework of the Core Projects of the Biodiversity Exploratories (www.biodiversity-exploratories.de), Core Project 8 (CP8; Microorganisms) assesses the structure of the soil microbiome, mainly bacteria, fungi and archaea in the frame of the general soil sampling campaigns as well as in joint multi-site experiments (REX, LUX, FOX) using metabarcoding approaches. Such data can be used to filter key stone taxa, assign them to functional guilds or metabolic profiles and establish correlative links to vegetation traits, soil properties and further environmental attributes. In addition, we perform shotgun based metagenomic analyses to enable in silico genome reconstruction of complex soil metagenomes, which opens avenues to establish more causal functional links and provides an opportunity to assess the soil virome (viruses and phages). These data sets provide important information for a number of Contributing Projects within the Biodiversity Exploratories and have been used successfully in many of the synthesis activities evaluating ecosystem function/services, multi-taxa analysis and multifunctionality across different management systems and land use intensities.