Friday, July 10, 2026

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM

Room BE.0.18

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Details

Soils are the most biodiverse habitat on Earth with ~60% of all biodiversity living in soil. Furthermore, soils deliver a range of ecosystem services, for instance, soils support 95% of our food production. To do this, healthy soils rely on teeming communities of bacteria, fungi, protozoa (microbiome) and soil fauna. Moreover, soil life maintains the biodiversity we see aboveground and is a huge reservoir for medicine and potential degraders of pollutants. It is clear soil biodiversity is central to sustainable soil management and needs to be included in biodiversity conservation practice. However, there is still limited knowledge on soil communities and functions, hampering conservation and restoration of soil communities. There is a myriad of open questions: How do we know what is a healthy community? How can we interpret soil (microbiome) biodiversity data? How can we benchmark and assess soil communities? Should we pre-define healthy communities or do we use data-driven approaches? How can soil community data be used by soil-managers and should we act on soil biodiversity in policies? Goal In this roundtable discission we will explore together how we can move from soil biodiversity data to using such data and knowledge for conservation and restoration of soils. We welcome perspectives from natural sciences as well as economics, governance sciences, and practitioners. We will use an interactive roundtable format for the discussion: -Introductions of workshop and attendees (15 mins) -Flash pitches on content (10 mins) -Groupwork using the ‘café of cultures’ format (40 mins) - -Plenary discussion and synthesis (25 mins)

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Organiser