Trophic relationships in the soil microfood-web: predicting the response to a changing global environment.

In this article, we evaluate how global environmental change may affect microfood-webs and trophic interactions in the soil, and the implications of this at the ecosystem level. First we outline how bottom-up (resource control) and top-down (predation-control) forces regulate food-web components. Food-web components can respond either positively or negatively to shifts in NPP resulting from global change, thus creating difficulties in developing general principles about the response of soil biota to global change phenomena. We also demonstrate that top-down effects can be important in soil food-webs, creating negative feed-backs which may partially counter bottom-up effects. Secondly, we determine how soil food-webs and the processes they regulate respond to various global change phenomena. Enhanced atmospheric CO