Standard methods for the assessment of structural and functional diversity of soil organisms : A critical overview

EA ECOLDUR

National audience

Inglés. Lack of standardized methods limits the ability to make comparisons across datasets and develop new global and regional experiments and assessments (such as the Global Soil Biodiversity Assessment (GSBI)). The main goal of this talk is to synthesize the current methodological approaches to measure structural and functional diversity of soil organisms and to identify gaps and ways to improve the methods to allow for comparable datasets. This exercise is urgently necessary because there are several ongoing regional and global soil biodiversity studies that are not coordinated with one another in terms of the methodological approach. Therefore, in a first step standard methods to sample, identify, determine and assess soil organisms currently in use or proposed all over the world will be critically evaluated, using well-accepted criteria such as ecological relevance, practicability of usage in terms of resources, time and costs, level of standardization etc. Methods addressing both soil organisms (population) structure and functions will be included, with a special focus on relatively new molecular methods based on DNA extraction. Soil microbes as well as soil invertebrates will be covered. In particular, the activities of the Technical Committee (TC) 190 of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) will be highlighted, since ISO guidelines (= standard methods) are legally accredited by many national or international authorities when putting conservation laws and regulations into practice. Finally, detailed recommendations will be proposed regarding gaps in the available set of standards, to identify a list of new methods most urgently needed. Finally, we will discuss the ones that have to be developed from scratch and the ones which could be developed based on available methods, already used by the scientific community. We propose to organize this whole process under the umbrella of GSBI in order to ensure a truly global approach for the assessment of soil biodiversity.