- News from Flinders University –
With up to 75% of the world’s soils degraded, restoration projects try to re-establish functional and biodiverse environments to secure adequate food production, biodiversity, climate regulation and human wellbeing.
Soil ecology and restoration experts at Flinders University warn that restoring the full suite of key components to degraded soil can be a lengthy and difficult process.
What appears above ground in native revegetation efforts does not automatically improve the complex web of fungi, other microbes and ecosystem components such as nutrients and decomposers to restore soil health for biodiverse and functional long-term sustainable growth.
New research published in Molecular Ecology examines changes in soil fungal communities over a six-year interval – finding that different aspects of soil fungal communities may recover at different rates following restoration plantings.
Restoration of degraded landscapes usually focuses on vegetation which yields positive and measurable outcomes, but this may not translate to recovery across the whole ecosystem, says lead researcher Matthew Flinders Professor Martin Breed, from the Restoration Ecology research group.
“Ecologically degraded sites need ongoing monitoring and management to check for the long-term recovery of the whole community of fungi and other important soil properties,” says Professor Breed, from the College of Science and Engineering.
“Our longitudinal resampling study identified changes consistent with continued functional recovery over six years, despite little additional progress in whole fungal community recovery.
“This could be attributed to the land-use history and elevated soil nutrient levels in the post-agricultural sites, which can act as a barrier to full fungal and microbial recovery.”
Future studies could look at different restoration approaches and ecosystems to assess barriers and solutions.
Monitoring soil and leaf-litter biodiversity remains a major barrier to tracking restoration success, particularly for invertebrates that underpin key processes such as nutrient cycling and soil aggregation.
In another recent article, published in Biology Letters, Flinders University researchers used a form of soil eco-acoustics to measure invertebrate activity in soil profiles, in order to assess soil and ecosystem health.
Soil invertebrates play an important role in overall soil health, contributing to nutrient cycling, soil aggregation and influencing plant health and food web dynamics.
Flinders University PhD candidate Amy Annells says the low-cost, sound-attenuated recording system was able to identify distinct acoustic signatures from the movements of six common surface-dwelling insects, including house cricket, red wiggler worm, mealworm and huntsman spider.
Funding was provided by the New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment as well as the Australian Research Council and the Australian Government under the National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub.
The authors acknowledge the contribution of Australian Microbiome, Parks Australia, the CSIRO and the Biomes of Australian Soil Environments (BASE) consortium.
Journal reference: ‘Restoration plantings promote functional recovery of soil fungi’ (2026) by Carl D Watson, Alfie J Lem, Andrew Bissett (CSIRO Hobart), Christian Cando-Dumancela, Michael G Gardner, Riley J Hodgson, Craig Liddicoat, Shawn D Peddle and Martin F Breed, published in Molecular Ecology DOI: 10.1111/mec.70552.
Source: Scimex
