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Summary Use of synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) is a promising approach that harnesses nature‐based solutions to support soil fertility and food security, mitigate climate change impacts, and restore terrestrial ecosystems. Several microbial products are in the market, and many others are at different stages of development and commercialization. Yet, we are still far from being able to fully harness the potential and successful applications of such biotechnological tools. The limited field efficiency and efficacy of SynComs have significantly constrained commercial opportunities, resulting in market growth falling below expectations. To overcome these challenges and manage expectations, it is critical to address current limitations, failures, and potential environmental consequences of SynComs. In this Viewpoint, we explore how using multiple eco‐evolutionary theories can inform SynCom design and success. We further discuss the current status of SynComs and identify the next steps needed to develop and deploy the next generation of tools to boost their ability to support multiple ecosystem services, including food security and environmental sustainability. 

Soil organisms represent the most abundant and diverse organisms on the planet and support almost every ecosystem function we know, and thus impact our daily lives. Some of these impacts have been well-documented, such as the role of soil organisms in regulating soil fertility and carbon sequestration; processes that have direct implications for essential ecosystem services including food security and climate change mitigation. Moreover, soil biodiversity also plays a critical role in supporting other aspects from One Health—the combined health of humans, animals, and the environment—to the conservation of historic structures such as monuments. Unfortunately, soil biodiversity is also highly vulnerable to a growing number of stressors associated with global environmental change. Understanding how and when soil biodiversity supports these functions, and how it will adapt to changing environmental conditions, is crucial for conserving soils and maintaining soil processes for future generations. In this Essay, we discuss the fundamental importance of soil biodiversity for supporting multiple ecosystem services and One Health, and further highlight essential knowledge gaps that need to be addressed to conserve soil biodiversity for the next generations. 

Global warming is expected to significantly impact the soil fungal and bacterial microbiomes, yet the predominant ecological response of microbial taxa—whether an increase, decrease, or no change—remains unclear. It is also unknown whether microbial taxa from different evolutionary lineages exhibit common patterns and what factors drive these changes. Here, we analyzed three mid‐term (> 5 years) warming experiments across contrasting dryland and temperate‐boreal ecosystems, encompassing over 500 topsoil samples collected across multiple time points. We found that warming altered the relative abundance of microbial taxa, with both increases and decreases over time. For instance, the relative abundance of bacterial and fungal taxa responding to warming (increase or decrease) accounted for 35.9% and 42.9% in the dryland ecosystem, respectively. Notably, taxa within the same phylum exhibited divergent responses to warming. These ecological shifts were linked to factors such as photosynthetic cover and fungal lifestyle, both of which influence soil functions. Overall, our findings indicate that soil warming can reshape a significant fraction of the microbial community across ecosystems, potentially driving changes in soil functions. 

The intensification of drought throughout the U.S. Great Plains has the potential to have large impacts on grassland functioning, as has been shown with dramatic losses of plant productivity annually. Yet, we have a poor understanding of how grassland functioning responds after drought ends. This study examined how belowground nutrient cycling responds after drought and whether legacy effects persist postdrought. We assessed the 2-year recovery of nutrient cycling processes following a 4-year experimental drought in a mesic grassland by comparing two different growing season drought treatments—chronic (each rainfall event reduced by 66%) and intense (all rain eliminated until 45% of annual rainfall was achieved)—to the control (ambient precipitation) treatment. At the beginning of the first growing season postdrought, we found that in situ soil CO2 efflux and laboratory-based soil microbial respiration were reduced by 42% and 22%, respectively, in the intense drought treatment compared to the control, but both measures had recovered by midseason (July) and remained similar to the control treatment in the second postdrought year. We also found that extractable soil ammonium and total inorganic N were elevated throughout the growing season in the first year after drought in the intense treatment. However, these differences in inorganic N pools did not persist during the growing season of the second year postdrought. The remaining measures of C and N cycling in both drought treatments showed no postdrought treatment effects. Thus, although we observed short-term legacy effects following the intense drought, C and N cycling returned to levels comparable to nondroughted grassland within a single growing season regardless of whether the drought was intense or chronic in nature. Overall, these results suggest that the key aspects of C and N cycling in mesic tallgrass prairie do not exhibit persistent legacies from 4 years of experimentally induced drought. 

The proposed Biology Integration Institute will bring together two major research institutions in the Upper Midwest—the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)—to investigate the causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in a rapidly changing world —from genes and molecules within cells and tissues to communities, ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere. The Institute focuses on plant biodiversity, defined broadly to encompass the heterogeneity within life that occurs from the smallest to the largest biological scales. A premise of the Institute is that life is envisioned as occurring at different scales nested within several contrasting conceptions of biological hierarchies, defined by the separate but related fields of physiology, evolutionary biology and ecology. The Institute will emphasize the use of ‘spectral biology’—detection of biological properties based on the interaction of light energy with matter—and process-oriented predictive models to investigate the processes by which biological components at one scale give rise to emergent properties at higher scales. Through an iterative process that harnesses cutting edge technologies to observe a suite of carefully designed empirical systems—including the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and some of the world’s longest running and state-of-the-art global change experiments—the Institute will advance biological understanding and theory of the causes and consequences of changes in biodiversity and at the interface of plant physiology, ecology and evolution. INTELLECTUAL MERIT The Institute brings together a diverse, gender-balanced and highly productive team with significant leadership experience that spans biological disciplines and career stages and is poised to integrate biology in new ways. Together, the team will harness the potential of spectral biology, experiments, observations and synthetic modeling in a manner never before possible to transform understanding of how variation within and among biological scales drives plant and ecosystem responses to global change over diurnal, seasonal and millennial time scales. In doing so, it will use and advance state-of-the-art theory. The institute team posits that the designed projects will unearth transformative understanding and biological rules at each of the various scales that will enable an unprecedented capacity to discern the linkages between physiological, ecological and evolutionary processes in relation to the multi-dimensional nature of biodiversity in this time of massive planetary change. A strength of the proposed Institute is that it leverages prior federal investments in research and formalizes partnerships with foreign institutions heavily invested in related biodiversity research. Most of the planned projects leverage existing research initiatives, infrastructure, working groups, experiments, training programs, and public outreach infrastructure, all of which are already highly synergistic and collaborative, and will bring together members of the overall research and training team. BROADER IMPACTS A central goal of the proposed Institute is to train the next generation of diverse integrative biologists. Post-doctoral, graduate student and undergraduate trainees, recruited from non-traditional and underrepresented groups, including through formal engagement with Native American communities, will receive a range of mentoring and training opportunities. Annual summer training workshops will be offered at UMN and UW as well as training experiences with the Global Change and Biodiversity Research Priority Program (URPP-GCB) at the University of Zurich (UZH) and through the Canadian Airborne Biodiversity Observatory (CABO). The Institute will engage diverse K-12 audiences, the general public and Native American communities through Market Science modules, Minute Earth videos, a museum exhibit and public engagement and educational activities through the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (CCESR) and the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Association.