Plant-Soil Interactions

How can we leverage ecological processes to meet the increasing global demand for food while reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture? This still is a critical question that needs to be addressed to tackle the global grand challenge of sustainable crop production. Soil microbes play a key role in nutrient cycling, and may confer drought and pathogen tolerance in plants. Hence, if we are to promote sustainable agroecosystem, we must look to managing interactions between plants and soil biotic and abiotic variables. By promoting ecological diversity and ecosystem services across scales, including aboveground-belowground interactions, diversified farming systems help build soil fertility and more broadly create environmentally sound agriculture. We endeavor to better understand mechanisms underpinning plant-soil interactions and how to design diversified farming systems to harness plant-soil interactions for optimized agroecosystem functioning.