Carbon cycling models consider soil carbon sequestration a key process for climate change mitigation. However, these models mostly focus on abiotic soil processes and, despite its recognized critical mechanistic role, do not explicitly include interacting soil organisms. Here, we use a literature study to show that even a relatively simple soil community (heathland soils) contains large uncertainties in temporal and spatial food web structure. Next, we used a Lotka-Volterra-based food web model to demonstrate that, due to these uncertainties, climate change can either increase or decrease soil carbon sequestration to varying extents. Both the strength and direction of changes strongly depend on (1) the main consumer's (enchytraeid worms) feeding preferences and (2) whether decomposers (fungi) or enchytraeid worms are more sensitive to stress. Hence, even for a soil community with a few dominant functional groups and a simulation model with a few parameters, filling these knowledge gaps is a critical first step towards the explicit integration of soil food web dynamics into carbon cycling models in order to better assess the role soils play in climate change mitigation.

中文翻译：

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食物网的不确定性影响气候变化对荒地土壤固碳的影响的预测。

碳循环模型认为土壤固碳是缓解气候变化的关键过程。但是，这些模型主要关注非生物土壤过程，尽管其公认的关键机制作用，但并未明确包括相互作用的土壤生物。在这里，我们使用一项文献研究表明，即使是相对简单的土壤群落（欧石南丛生的土壤）在时空食物网结构上也存在很大的不确定性。接下来，我们使用基于Lotka-Volterra的食物网模型来证明，由于这些不确定性，气候变化可以在不同程度上增加或减少土壤碳固存。变化的强度和方向都强烈地取决于（1）主要消费者的（蠕虫蠕虫）的喂养偏好，以及（2）分解者（真菌）或肠蠕虫蠕虫对压力更敏感。