LINKING BIODIVERSITY AND ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING OF SOILS AND SEDIMENTS

Soils, freshwater sediments and marine sediments offer a new frontier of vast, poorly known ecosystems that are critical to life on earth, T hey are connected by similarities in biota, ecosystem processes, bioge ochemistry, and, the types of processes carried out by the diversity o f biota, We know a lot about the ecosystem processes in these domains through studies of: functional groups of organisms, but we know much l ess about keystone species, or biodiversity across habitats and thus w e cannot, with certainty, answer questions such as, ''will a change in diversity in an agricultural sail affect the flow of energy, water an d chemicals across the interconnected domains?''. Linkages of knowledg e across the three domains would increase our understanding of how hum an-driven changes affect subsurface biodiversity and functioning, and, in turn, how these impacts influence aboveground ecosystem functionin g. Approaches utilizing this knowledge will identify the long term str ategies needed to attain sustainable soils, freshwaters and marine sys tems, Syntheses of available data far comparisons of biodiversity and processes across soils and sediments are priorities.