Effects of Disturbances on Forest Soil Biochemistry

Dear Colleagues,

Forest soil is a habitat of numerous organisms, including viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protozoa, which fulfill key processes in the soil, such as decomposition and nutrient mineralization, and play crucial roles in soil biochemistry processes (such as soil health, water and air flows, and energy fluxes). However, forest ecosystems around the world face tremendous challenges from human disturbances and climate changes, especially in dry forest ecosystems.

Today, characterizations of soil organisms have been largely accessed using sequencing approaches. Despite the recent progress in soil biology and biochemistry over the last few decades, various important questions remain unanswered—for instance, what the environment-controlling factors of the spatial distribution of the soil organisms in forest soil in the dry forest ecosystems are, how human disturbances control the soil organism community and biochemical processes in various climate conditions, how to distinguish the contribution of human disturbances and climate changes to soil functions (such as carbon sequestration function, hydrologic conservation function, water and soil conservation function) in forest ecosystems, and how biotic and abiotic drivers control these biochemical processes in forest ecosystems.

Thus, this Special Issue will include different types of contributions: perspectives, reviews, methodology, meta-analyses, and original research articles that focus on the soil biochemical processes under human disturbances and climate changes in forest ecosystems. Moreover, we welcome papers dealing with the importance of soil biodiversity, machine learning in soil biochemistry, spatial modeling of soil fauna, soil and soil food web, soil hydrological function, and the interaction between soil biology with soil physicochemical properties and processes to regulate belowground functions.

Dr. Yang Yang
Dr. Andrey Soromotin
Dr. Tongchuan Li
Dr. Jiangbo Qiao
Guest Editors

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