Challenges of and opportunities for protecting European soil biodiversity
ROMY ZEISS
Doctoral Student, German Centre for Integrative Research, iDiv
Belowground biodiversity is neglected in most global biodiversity assessments and conservation actions. How and why do soils have lesser priority for nature conservation? We wanted to get an overview of how policy-makers addressed soil biodiversity and related ecosystem functions in the past and present. We reviewed the current status of soil protection by (1) summarizing past and current soil-related policies (focus: Europe), (2) investigating the effect of current conservation efforts (European protected areas), (3) revealing the role of soil in conservation management (example: German management plans for nature conservation areas).
Figure 1: Effect of nature conservation areas on soil functioning (LUCAS soil data). From Zeiss et al. 2022.
First, we found that soil-related policies have still been insufficient for the protection of soil biodiversity. They are mainly addressing soil contamination in agricultural systems, low-binding, not aiming for soil nature conservation but rather other environmental objectives. Second, soils in European nature conservation areas do not perform better in terms of their ecosystem functioning. Third, management in nature conservation areas failed to address soil conservation adequately. Management plans regarded “soil” to describe the site, in its role as habitat for aboveground organisms, without mentioning its intrinsic value or linking this aspect to other values.
To move forward, we proposed eight leverages for a targeted perspective on soil biodiversity conservation: Expand existing activities, consider a full ecosystem approach, set baselines as references, monitor threats to soil biodiversity, define species lists for nature conservation, establish a soil indicator system, and identify priority areas for soil biodiversity.
Read the paper: Zeiss, R., Eisenhauer, N., Orgiazzi, A., Rillig, M., Buscot, F., Jones, A., Lehman, A., Reitz, T., Smith, L. & Guerra, C. A. (2022). Challenges of and opportunities for protecting European soil biodiversity. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13930