Soil ecology in the 21st century - a crucial role in land management

My goal is to modernize the discipline of soil ecology, by overcoming limitations of scale and integration. Most of the important processes in the soil occur at the molecular and microbial scales, but land management decisions are made at the landscape scale. I will use a quantitative approach to make complex soil ecological knowledge relevant to the decision making scale. I will develop methods to 1) up-scale soil ecological knowledge to the landscape scale; and 2) integrate and translate complex soil ecological data so that land managers can use it. This work will be undertaken in the context of soil carbon sequestration, but the disciplinary advances made will be relevant to all areas of soil ecology.