Five decades ago, a landmark paper in Science titled The Cave Environment heralded caves as ideal natural experimental laboratories in which to develop and address general questions in geology, ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Although the ‘caves as laboratory’ paradigm has since been advocated by subterranean biologists, there are few examples of studies that successfully translated their results into general principles. The contemporary era of big data, modelling tools, and revolutionary advances in genetics and (meta)genomics provides an opportunity to revisit unresolved questions and challenges, as well as examine promising new avenues of research in subterranean biology. Accordingly, we have developed a roadmap to guide future research endeavours in subterranean biology by adapting a well‐established methodology of ‘horizon scanning’ to identify the highest priority research questions across six subject areas. Based on the expert opinion of 30 scientists from around the globe with complementary expertise and of different academic ages, we assembled an initial list of 258 fundamental questions concentrating on macroecology and microbial ecology, adaptation, evolution, and conservation. Subsequently, through online surveys, 130 subterranean biologists with various backgrounds assisted us in reducing our list to 50 top‐priority questions. These research questions are broad in scope and ready to be addressed in the next decade. We believe this exercise will stimulate research towards a deeper understanding of subterranean biology and foster hypothesis‐driven studies likely to resonate broadly from the traditional boundaries of this field.

中文翻译：

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地下生物学的基本研究问题

五年前，《科学》杂志上一篇题为《洞穴环境》的里程碑式论文将洞穴视为理想的自然实验实验室，可以在其中开发和解决地质学、生态学、生物地理学和进化生物学中的一般问题。尽管此后地下生物学家一直提倡“洞穴作为实验室”范式，但很少有研究将其结果成功转化为一般原则的例子。大数据、建模工具以及遗传学和（元）基因组学的革命性进步的当代时代为重新审视未解决的问题和挑战提供了机会，并检查了有希望的地下生物学研究新途径。因此，我们制定了路线图，通过采用完善的“地平线扫描”方法来确定六个学科领域的最高优先级研究问题，以指导地下生物学的未来研究工作。根据来自世界各地具有互补专业知识和不同学术年龄的 30 位科学家的专家意见，我们汇总了 258 个基本问题的初步清单，重点是宏观生态学和微生物生态学、适应、进化和保护。随后，通过在线调查，130 名具有不同背景的地下生物学家帮助我们将清单减少到 50 个最重要的问题。这些研究问题范围广泛，准备在未来十年内解决。