Synthetic soil communities
Soils are essential to sustain life in terrestrial ecosystems. However, a conceptual framework that describes how the structural and functional diversity of the soil microbiome and its interaction to higher trophic levels influences energy and matter fluxes in soil is still largely missing. We use a synthetic soil community reflecting the major microbial taxa and microbial grazers in soil to study causal relationships between the energy and matter input to soils, the structure and function of the soil microbiome, and the resulting energy and matter fluxes.