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Ecological restoration: Soil microbes call the shots

Nature Plants volume 2, Article number: 16117 (2016) Cite this article

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Restoration of damaged ecosystems usually involves fairly crude techniques. A new study suggests that the use of soil inocula can ‘design’ new target communities more subtly.

The degradation of ecosystems due to human activity has increased in intensity over the last century or so. Ecological restoration is the only solution to this problem; repairing and, indeed, in some places replacing these damaged systems with ones that are healthier and provide more ecosystem-derived goods and services. Until now, successful ecological restoration has involved rather crude techniques, such as soil removal, deep ploughing, and both herbicidal and mechanical removal of species. Writing in this issue of Nature Plants, Wubs and colleagues1 show that more subtle techniques using soil inocula can guide the development of vegetation communities in different directions and towards specified targets.

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Figure 1: Effects of soil inoculation on plant and soil communities in the field after topsoil removal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robert H. Marrs is the Bulley Professor of Applied Plant Biology in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GP, UK.,

    Robert H. Marrs

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  1. Robert H. Marrs
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Correspondence to Robert H. Marrs.

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Marrs, R. Ecological restoration: Soil microbes call the shots. Nature Plants 2, 16117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.117

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.117

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