Soil ecosystems are both particularly important to humans and vulnerable to human-made global change. Here, we identify some key aspects of soil community and ecosystem research that need to be more widely studied to understand soil responses to global change and enable us to efficiently protect them. This perspective integrates multiple taxa and trophic levels, combines structural community variables with ecosystem processes, and considers multiple energy channels rather than focusing on only bacterial, fungal, or plant-derived resources. Moreover, it enables implementing the claim that terrestrial ecosystem research should more widely adopt an integrative view of above–belowground processes. Having identified these key areas requiring higher attention, we suggest a wider application of the food-web energetics approach to calculating energy flux as a suitable and very powerful tool to simultaneously integrate these aspects. The approach combines food-web and metabolic theory to quantify energy flux through trophic networks as a universal currency of multitrophic ecosystem functioning. In addition to whole-community metrics, it allows for quantifying various important processes by summing up the flux out of autotrophs, detritus, or animals to their respective consumers. This includes the assessment of processes that are otherwise hard to quantify, such as belowground herbivory or predation. The calculation requires data on the focal community and its metabolic demand, trophic interactions, feeding preferences and assimilation efficiency, some of which can be measured, whereas other components can be inferred from readily available literature resources. We outline how novel, high-throughput methods, such as metabarcoding, can be combined with the energy-flux approach to improve our understanding of soil ecosystem structure and functioning. We hope that our article motivates fellow soil researchers to adopt energy-flux approaches for their community data and support the further development of this promising approach for soil community and ecosystem science.

中文翻译：

---

走出黑暗：利用能量通量连接地上和地下社区和生态系统功能

土壤生态系统对人类特别重要，也容易受到人为的全球变化的影响。在这里，我们确定了需要更广泛研究的土壤群落和生态系统研究的一些关键方面，以了解土壤对全球变化的响应并使我们能够有效地保护它们。这种观点整合了多个分类群和营养水平，将结构群落变量与生态系统过程相结合，并考虑了多种能量通道，而不是仅仅关注细菌、真菌或植物衍生资源。此外，它能够实现陆地生态系统研究应该更广泛地采用对地上-地下过程的综合观点的主张。在确定了这些需要高度关注的关键领域后，我们建议更广泛地应用食物网能量学方法来计算能量通量，作为同时整合这些方面的合适且非常强大的工具。该方法结合了食物网和代谢理论，通过营养网络量化能量通量，作为多营养生态系统功能的通用货币。除了整个社区指标之外，它还允许通过总结自养生物、碎屑或动物到各自消费者的通量来量化各种重要过程。这包括评估难以量化的过程，例如地下食草或捕食。计算需要有关焦点群落及其代谢需求、营养相互作用、摄食偏好和同化效率的数据，其中一些可以测量，而其他组件可以从现成的文献资源中推断出来。我们概述了如何将新的高通量方法（例如元条形码）与能量通量方法相结合，以提高我们对土壤生态系统结构和功能的理解。我们希望我们的文章能激励土壤研究人员对他们的群落数据采用能量通量方法，并支持这种有前途的土壤群落和生态系统科学方法的进一步发展。