Abstract
Understanding global biodiversity change, its drivers, and the ecosystem consequences requires a better appreciation of both the factors that shape soil macrofauna communities and the ecosystem effects of these organisms. The project "sOilFauna" was funded by the synthesis center sDiv (Germany) to address this major gap by forming a community of soil ecologists, identifying the most pressing research questions and hypotheses, as well as conducting a series of workshops to foster the global synthesis and hypothesis testing of soil macrofauna. The overarching goal is to analyze the most comprehensive soil macrofauna database