Key messages
• Soil is an important habitat for thousand millions of organisms.
• Soil biodiversity is extremely diverse in shapes, colours, sizes and functions.
• Soil biodiversity is globally distributed, from deserts to polar regions through grasslands, forests, urban and agricultural areas.
• Soil biodiversity supports many services essential to human beings: plant growth, water and climate regulation, and disease control, among
others.
• Soil biodiversity is increasingly under threat due to several pressures acting on soils.
• Interventions to reduce the impact of threats to soil biodiversity are available and should be widely adopted.
• Policies to protect and value soil biodiversity are still at an early stage and need to be further developed.
http://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/content/global-soil-biodiversity-atlas