Review of Ecological Production Functions (EPF)

This document represents the deliverable D3.1 provided by the EJP SOIL internal project ‘MINOTAUR’ about quantified relationships between soil biodiversity and soil functions. Using literature review data and collected data in MINOTAUR for biological indicators frequently used in soil monitoring and soil health assessment studies, the objective of this document is to provide some elaborated examples of EPFs. In this document, results include four examples of mediation by various groups of soil organisms of soil processes that critically contribute to the provision of some essential ecosystem services: primary productivity, soil structure maintenance assessed by soil aggregate stability, water regulation assessed by water infiltration and carbon storage. While the MINOTAUR project has closed to date, it is the ambition of the authors to publish the results of this particular study in a peer-reviewed journal. This has already been done for one ecosystem service (primary production), but not for the others. As such publication would appear under its own DOI, the raw data used in the analyses will be published as supplementary information in the journal, and to avoid further duplication are not available in association to this Zenodo deposited document. When published, the DOI of the paper will be provided here in an update.