SoilForEUROPE-Predicting European forest soil biodiversity and its functioning under ongoing climate change

By integrating research across the major forest ecosystems in Europe and using a wide range of tools and approaches from genomics to socioeconomics, SoilForEUROPE aims at establishing a scientifically thorough knowledge base about the importance of forest soil biodiversity for the goods and services provided by European forests, and its management in view of adaptation strategies to climate change.SoilForEUROPE is a European project (BiodivERsA) funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO, Belgium), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO, Belgium), and the Swedish Research Council (FORMAS, Sweden). It aims to (1) link soil biodiversity with tree species richness across European forests, (2) determine the role of biodiversity in ecosystem resistance and resilience to drought, and (3) assess the socio-economic value of soil biodiversity and its impact on decision-making.This project utilizes an already existing network of more than two hundred forest plots ranging from monospecific to multispecies forests in six typical and climatically different European forest types that were established as forest exploratories in the FunDivEUROPE project.To complement the network of comparative plots in mature forests, we also study two European sites from the global network of tree diversity experiments (TreeDivNet), FORBIO and ORPHEE , that additionally manipulate climatic variables. We also use the CNRS European Ecotron in Montpellier, a world leading controlled environment facility for ecosystem research, to study the interactive effects of soil biodiversity and drought on ecosystem functioning.