Abstract
et al. 2016), or facilitate litter decomposition by up to 50 %, depending on climatic conditions (García-Palacios et al. 2013). These effects largely emerge from biological interactions within and among functional groups of soil animals, microbes, and plants (Bonkowski et al. 2009, Coulibaly et al. 2019, Potapov 2021). Local variations in animal communities may sum up to considerable effects on ecosystem processes at the biosphere level (Handa et al. 2014, Seibold et al. 2021). There have been several calls to include explicitly soil animal effects in global biogeochemical (Filser et al. 2016, Soong & Nielsen 2016, Deckmyn et al. 2020) and soil erosion models (Orgiazzi & Panagos 2018), but the required large-scale