The soil food web: structure and perspectives

This review outlines directions for future research in soil food web ecology. Two lines of research are considered to be most important: the adoption of new methodologies to investigate food relationships and the strengthening of experimentation to investigate the interaction strength between food web components. For a better understanding of food relationships molecular methods, particularly fluorescence in situ hybridization, and stable isotope methodology, including the analysis of variations in the abundance of 13C and 15N, are thought to be most promising. Implications of results of the studies which employed these methodologies for the structure and function of soil food webs are highlighted.