Eco-Evolutionary Optimality in Soil Organic Matter Models

Abstract

Soil microorganisms mediate carbon and nutrient fluxes in soils, and—as all organisms—are subject to eco-evolutionary dynamics. Adaptation of soil microbial functionality to environmental conditions across space and time has consequences for biogeochemical fluxes that are often not explicitly considered in models describing soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics. Eco-evolutionary optimization (EEO) tries to anticipate the outcome of eco-evolutionary dynamics, and can inform on how microbial functional traits might adapt to environmental conditions based on the maximisation of different proxies of microbial fitness. While different approaches employ different fitness proxies, they all aim to increase realism and generality by grounding SOM models in eco-evolutionary theory and introducing constraints on model parametrization. Despite this potential, challenges for widely applying EEO approaches to advance SOM models persist and open questions remain, primarily concerning implicit assumptions, convergence of predictions, and empirical validation of the different EEO approaches. In this Synthesis, we review EEO approaches that have been applied to SOM models and provide an instructive primer to EEO approaches. We then propose a general categorization, aiming to make their underlying assumptions explicit and give an outlook for future research directions.