Scientific publications
Joseph Blaise Dongmo
Pablo Sánchez-Cueto* (Corresponding author)
Other affiliations: Universitat de Barcelona
Radu Ghemis
Montse Bosch
Marcos Parras-Moltó
Cristina Yacoub-Lopez
Martin Hartmann
Laura García‐Velázquez
Beatriz Gozalo
Santiago Soliveres
Victoria Ochoa
Giulia Bongiorno
R.G.M. de Goede
Melpomeni Zoka
Nikolaos Stathopoulos
Charalampos Kontoes
L. Núñez Martínez
Jorge Mataix‐Solera
Fuensanta García‐Orenes
Tomas Van de Sande
Helle Hestbjerg
I. Alsiņa
Zoltán Tóth
María Paula Barral
Ximena Sirimarco
Rochana Tangkoonboribun
Anna Clocchiatti
Other affiliations: University of Amsterdam
Salvador Lladó
Global Change Biology
Unsustainable soil management, climate change, and land degradation jeopardize soil biodiversity and soil-mediated ecosystem functions. Although the transition from conventional to organic agriculture has been proposed as a potential solution to alleviate these pressures, there is limited evidence of its effectiveness in enhancing belowground biodiversity across different biogeographical regions, climates, and land degradation levels. In this study, we holistically assessed the status of soil biodiversity, from microorganisms to meso- and macrofauna, in agroecosystems distributed across four continents. We identified the primary environmental community composition drivers and assessed the effects of the transition from conventional to organic management (no chemical inputs) on soil ecology. Our findings highlight the mean temperature and precipitation of the warmest and coldest quarters of the year, aridity, pH, and soil texture as the primary drivers of the different soil biodiversity components. Overall, organic farming has a significant but small impact on soil biodiversity compared to the other community drivers. On top of that, the results demonstrate the importance of a regional-specific context for a future generalized transition towards organic soil management. Specifically, under the most arid conditions in our study, organic management showed potential to buffer biodiversity loss in highly degraded soils, with a significant increase in diversity for prokaryotes and protists compared to conventionally managed soils. Therefore, the combination of a global and, simultaneously, regional-specific approach supports the hypothesis that a shift towards organic agriculture would maximize its beneficial impact on belowground diversity in highly degraded soils under arid conditions over the coming years, being a crucial tool to increase resilience and adaptation to global change for agriculture.
