Book Review: Shifting Paradigms on Soil Microbial Biomass

Abstract

(1991) proposed the first quantitative assessment of the potential for a “feedback effect” whereby the additional carbon dioxide released from decomposition of organic matter in soils in a warmer world could accelerate climate change. Aside from this historically-minded introduction, the book contains 9 other chapters, dealing successively with the role of the soil microbial biomass in cycling nutrients (Chapter 2), managing soil microbial biomass for sustainable agro-ecosystems (Chapter 3), microbial biomass and functions in paddy soil (Chapter 4), soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Chapter 5), building predictive models for diverse microbial communities in soil (Chapter 6), dynamic compound-specific stable isotope probing of the soil microbial biomass (Chapter 7), emerging culture-independent tools to enhance our understanding of soil microbial ecology (Chapter 8), microbial ecosystem functions in wetlands under disturbance (Chapter 9), and arctic soil microbial sensitivity to seasonal dynamics and climate change (Chapter 10). Chapters 3 and 9 (Steenbergh et al., 2017; Stockdale and Murphy, 2017) stress explicitly the need to open up the microbial black box, and they describe several of the spectroscopic and microscopic techniques, like NanoSIMS, Raman microscopy, in-situ hybridization, and single-cell extraction, that major technological advances in the past decade have made available to soil microbiologists to observe individual microorganisms in their natural, microscale environments. In his detailed review of modeling efforts, Allison (2017), in Chapter 6, argues that “micron-scale interactions must be considered in macroscale processes,” and mentions in that context that recently-developed agent-based models are able to “reveal how social interactions and spatial structure in microbial communities influence biogeochemical processes.”