Microbes play critical roles regulating biogeochemical cycles. More explicit treatment of microbial processes in large-scale predictive models is needed, and elucidating these processes requires a unified approach. Biogeochemical approaches focus on process, pools, and fluxes while microbial approaches often focus on individual or community traits, physiology, and community structure. Physical and chemical properties of soil provide niche space for microorganisms and influence community resilience to local disturbances and regional climatic shifts. Specific assemblages of microbes can differentially influence rates of nutrient cycling, and physiological acclimation to environmental change is likely. Although advances in molecular and genetic tools are improving our understanding of how microbial processes influence ecosystem scale cycles, questions surrounding the level of detail appropriate to best predict environmental response to change remain. This session invites studies that investigate microbial populations, communities and microbial-mediated processes controlling carbon and nutrient cycling, feedbacks on plant communities, and effects on ecosystem function.

• SSSA: Soil Science Society of America -