Multifunctionality of Belowground Food Webs

Dear Colleagues,

Belowground food webs play important roles, including key element cycling and soil agglomeration. Soil ecosystem multifunctionality, regarded as an important indicator for reflecting nutrient cycling and retention as well as plant diversity, makes it possible to reveal the multifunctionality of belowground food webs. Belowground biodiversity relates closely to ecosystem multifunctionality in various terrestrial ecosystems. However, must remains unknown about linkages between ecosystem multifunctionality and whole belowground diversity and the abundances of core organisms. Prosperous bioinformatic technology including metagenomics, amplicon sequencing, and rapid species identification systems can provide crucial information and overall advance our understanding of the multifunctionality of belowground food webs at a given site or on a global scale, and allow for better agricultural management.

With this Special Issue of Agronomy, we welcome the submission of papers involving linkages between ecosystem multifunctionality and belowground diversity and the abundance of core organisms, as well as those addressing functional gene diversity. We also encourage colleagues to submit papers revealing the contribution of belowground multifunctionality to aboveground crop yield in agroecosystems and papers disentangling mechanisms underlying the difference in multifunctionality between agricultural and nonagricultural soils.

Dr. Wenjie Wan
Guest Editor

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