This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: With up to 75% of the world's soils degraded, restoration projects try to reestablish functional and biodiverse environments to secure adequate food production, biodiversity, climate regulation and human well-being. 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.
Aboveground results from native revegetation efforts do not automatically mean improvements in the complex web of fungi, other microbes and ecosystem components such as nutrients and decomposers needed to restore soil health for biodiverse, functional and sustainable long-term 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 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 to assess soil and ecosystem health. Soil invertebrates play an important role in overall soil health, contributing to nutrient cycling and soil aggregation and influencing plant health and food web dynamics.
Corresponding author Amy Annells, a Ph.D. candidate at Flinders University, says the low-cost, sound-attenuated recording system was able to identify distinct acoustic signatures from the movements of six common surface-dwelling invertebrates, including house crickets, red wiggler worms, mealworms and huntsman spiders. Watson et al., Restoration Plantings Promote Functional Recovery of Soil Fungi, Molecular Ecology (2026). DOI: 10.1111/mec.70552 Amy N.
Annells et al., Acoustic differentiation of soil-surface-dwelling invertebrates under controlled conditions, Biology Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2026.0255 Journal information: Molecular Ecology , Biology Letters Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.
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