 Good morning and good afternoon and good evening to everyone joining us. It's wonderful to see you all. I would like to welcome you to the third day plenary session of the status of global soil biodiversity in the 2021 global symposium of soil biodiversity. It is a great honor to be here with you today. My name is Dr. Monica Farfenn. I am the Executive Director of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, headquartered here in Colorado, USA. In this webinar session, we will be listening to five presentations of 10 minutes each. I would kindly remind the presenters to keep it to a 10 minute presentation so that we can have time for questions and answers at the end. At nine minutes, if it's okay with you, I will intervene and let you know that you have one minute left. It is important that we keep to that 10 minutes. Attendees for the question and answer session, please use the chat to post your questions and include at the beginning, please, your name of the name of the presenter to who you want this question address. And we will choose a few of these questions to be answered live. Unfortunately, we will not be able to get to everyone's questions, but the rest will be answered via chat. Let's see. So without further ado, I would now like to give the floor to Ms. Rosa Cuervas Corona of the Global Soil Partnership, and she is going to be talking about the recent report that has come out the status of soil biodiversity. Rosa, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Monica. I will share my screen now. Can I share my screen please? Okay, could you see now? Yes. Perfect. Yes. Perfect. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening, distinguished guests. I will talk about the huge effort made by around 300 soil scientists translated in a global report about the status of knowledge of soil biodiversity and how this knowledge can contribute to the current global challenges. As we know, we already identified more than one million species from the eight million. So there's a huge potential to discover more species in terrestrial and marine ecosystems and soils are not the exception. And only one species dominates and is transforming our planet there and its dynamics. Considering the story of the universe, 3.8 billion years ago, everything starts in Earth, I mean, life starts in Earth and took this time, almost four billion years to evolution, co-evolution, adaptation, specialization for the human being to exist. And 70,000 years ago, human beings start constructing these complex structures called cultures and with that agricultural activities and after that economic and other kind of activities. Soil, as you know, it's a valuable natural capital, one of the most important and it's capable of providing key essential functions and ecosystem services that allow life on Earth basically. And as you can see here in this nice image unfortunately, 30% of our soils are degraded due to different activities related with industry, agricultural activities and also land use, producing of course the gradation of soils, compaction, salinization, pollution and of course the loss of soil biodiversity and also the loss of the complexity of the food webs. Considering this, FAU, GSB in collaboration with the CBD and GSBI prepared this and coordinate this important report, the global report, in order to contribute to the know-how to monitor, manage and use in a sustainable way soil biodiversity. A healthy soil is not only capable to provide essential ecosystem services, also contribute to the achievement of the SDGs, the IT targets and also human well-being. What is soil biodiversity then? We define, we have here the definition I will not read, but it is a variety of life, including microorganisms, micro, meso and macro fauna from micro avidats to landscape and I will show you very fast this splendid creators that are part of a beautiful, a low life on Earth. What do we know about soil biodiversity? As you well know, we identified already thousands of species in different groups. The main driving force of the high soil biodiversity is due to the body size fraction, the functional diversification and the variety of ecological niches from single-cells nanometers to landscapes. It's important to mention also that 25% of the biodiversity is related to soils and soils contains most diverse terrestrial communities on the planet and also that we cannot split above and below ground because the systems are open, of course, and flows matters and energy through them and something that happens below affects above and vice versa as you can see here in this image. Why is soil biodiversity is important? Okay, because we can, for example, for agricultural sector, we can use this as a clean biotechnology, using inoculants, specific bacteria, for example, and fixing bacteria in order to increase productivity, reduce leaching and therefore pollution, and also reduce non-CO2 emissions. Also, regarding biological control, we can use specific genes from a specific specific specific genesis in order to inoculate in plants, in this case a plant. Plant can, or the use of micro-organisms, bacteria and fungi can immobilize certain toxic compounds from soils. Regarding degradation, for example, soil biodecnosols and pioneer plants can use the best function of the system. Regarding soil, no, sorry, regarding human health, the discovery of denicillin has had major impacts on increasing human life expectancy. And of course, art is not the exception, as we can see, beauty inspires. The problem or the issue is that our diversity is in great danger, caused due to 10 major threats and the cost of inaction will be 50 billion euros per year. You can see here the 10 threats related with deforestation, agricultural intensification, pollution, salinization, nutrient imbalance, compaction, fire, urbanization, ceiling, among others. All of these threats will affect biodiversity in different grades, but the meaning of biodiversity habitats, also decreasing the complexity of the food webs, also for a specific species imbalance and therefore inputs from plant growth and also for microbes growth, et cetera, and also will take decades to recover the biodiversity. What are our challenges? A few countries that maintain national soil information systems include soil biodiversity and are related in most of the cases to develop countries, also there's a necessity to strengthen all the knowledge in all soil groups. We need to recognize soil biodiversity in the most global agendas. There's weak capacity to develop the adoption of novel technologies and also there's a necessity to invest in research related to microbiome, and also there's a need to scale up bio remediation to address soil pollution. As I mentioned already, the potentialities are huge regarding food security, biological control, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and also nutrition and human health, and more than ever with this pandemic situations. Also for climate change adaptation and mitigation and microorganisms are key for carbon sequestration. What are our way forward? It's very important to mainstreaming soil biodiversity in the sustainable development agenda, as I mentioned, as a UN decade on ecosystem restoration. As I mentioned, it's very important to develop standard protocols for assessing soil biodiversity in different scales. It's very important to establishment soil information systems, but including soil biodiversity as a key indicator of soil health. Also, it's very important to improve knowledge about soil microbiome and also about soil groups that form soil biodiversity, not only microorganisms. It's very important to establish a global soil biodiversity observatory and also an initiative for sustainable management of soil biodiversity. And finally, I will leave saying that small actions can cause big changes and as civil society, we can start doing these small actions. Thank you very much for your attention. Rosa, that was a wonderful synopsis of the report and the importance of soil biodiversity in the world and to humans. Thank you very much. I know we're going to have questions on this as we proceed. I would next like to turn the floor over to Dr. Carlo Fada. Dr. Fada is the director for biodiversity for food and agriculture research at the Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT. Dr. Fada, are you ready? Good afternoon, good morning, good evening to everybody. Let me share a presentation. I don't know. Do you see it? We do. Thank you. Thank you. So I think I will follow up on some critical aspect of Rosa's presentation. I think that it is important to understand a little bit better in production between above ground biodiversity and the below ground biodiversity. This seems to be separate world, but they're not really. They talk to each other and interact in very many ways. Just to be clear that I work on genetic diversity of crops or my area of expertise is more on the above ground. And so we talk about how those interactions can potentially, although there are many gaps, but how those interactions can potentially improve the sustainability and resilience of our ecosystem. I will go quickly through it because I think all this has been already mentioned several times during the conference, this symposium, but we all know what the challenges are. So there are malnutrition crisis where people, two billion people are suffering from micronutrient deficiencies and there is an increase of obesity. There is still a hundred million people that go to bed starving at the end of the day. There is a biodiversity crisis. We know that a lot of, I mean, particularly for food and agriculture. There are over 6,000 plant species that are known for that, of which 200 make major contribution to food production, but only nine account for 66% of total crop production. So not much of the agro biodiversity is used. We have the climate crisis and that is also only related to unsustainable agricultural practices that combine together from farm to for contributes to about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. And again, the land degradation crisis where the proportion of land which is degraded is about 25% in 2020, but it's set to increase if the current pattern of land degradation continues and if unsustainable agricultural practices continue to be used also considering that at the moment agricultural production system is the larger agricultural system on land because it's taking over other. And I think all these four crises are interlinked. They all link to the use of unsustainable practices. Rosa showed nice pictures about how this is how intensification of agriculture monocropping is is causing loss of soil biodiversity and this causing land degradation. And there is a big call for exchange because of that. So for example, FAO says that biodiversity for food and agriculture is indispensable to food security, sustainable development and the supply of many vital ecosystem services. And CBD talks about transformations that need to be achieving the production of good and services, especially food and through the adoption of agricultural methods that can meet growing global demands by imposing fewer negative impact on the environment. This is the trick you need we need to produce more food because population is growing but with less impact on the environment. The World Economic Forum. So even the private sector is very much aware of it. There is no future for business as usual. We're reaching irreversible keeping points for nature and climate and over half of the global GDP GDP is potentially threatened by nature loss and again agriculture is a major contributor to this nature loss. We need the best food we need the fundamental different model of agriculture based on diversifying farm biodiversity coming back replacing chemical input soil is of course very important. So we can see that the number of actors from civil society that economic UN agencies are all calling for a change. The soil are very important soil biodiversity is very important for ecosystem services in agriculture, because it improves soil fertility and this will be linked to more food production. This also contributes to proper protection. Before many years of work on soil biodiversity was thought that soil was just bringing diseases but now we know very well that soil can protect plants and from diseases and pests. This indicates climate change by absorbing carbon and it's also a reservoir for soil and water conservation and it does this on a number of approaches it was well explained by this paper on plant functional traits and soil and ecosystem services and because we're talking about plant functional traits. This is where we go into the, what could be a good agenda for research in the next future so when we look at the, the, the, the both ground perspective we do. We know that a lot of crops have a huge amount of diversity this is because they were adapted over the past 10,000 years in the beginning of agriculture to different environment, they were subjected to natural selection as well as well as human selection. So when we work on crops there is a huge amount of diversity that can be used and yet much of the intensive agriculture today only use one or few varieties. And what happens when we plant more varieties as one can see from these graphs is that the disease pressure decrease so if you have one variety that could be super resistant and so you have no disease but you are increasing it higher risk because you can also have very severe. And the more varieties you plant in your field, the damage actually get reduced so we know that diversity alone brings a reduction of disease pressure, but is it really alone. We also know that planting different varieties together also not only improve the resistance to pests and diseases but also improve it. So in this experiment, we planted the four different varieties in as mono mono variety trial and then we plant them all together in one crop and there was no one single variety that would actually beat the combination of the four when they are planted. And of course we call for a different type of management of the crop but it's interesting that when you bring those varieties together you have a better yield than any of the single lines. And also we know when we go down and how these varieties may interact and please don't look at all the details of the graph, the graph. And when we go down to to the what happens in the in the below ground connection, we have total root length, for example, characters average and there is a huge amount of diversity. So the root structure of this genetic diversity when you bring them of this when you when you bring them together is is also very broad and one would assume that these rooms would use the soil resources different. But the possibility is it is it possible that because when when you plan different varieties in one plot you have better person disease management best the better control of pests and diseases, better yield is because you have different root systems that actually use the soil biodiversity resources in the different way and so they're more efficient overall and and that could be and that could be a nice area because all these is done by people like me for example where who is looking at what happens to the crop, but any of the paper that is here is actually showing is actually showing what could be the the possible explanation for all these is there is something that links what is happening in the both ground with the below ground. And the last point because I was talking about the prices and because mentioned soils are pharmacy. So there are there is also soil and the nutrition prices and soil are the foundation of nutrition the plants, get their nutrients, the minerals, etc, from from the soil is. And so the more they are available in the soil and that can be favored as it was explained earlier by the previous by the previous speaker by by facilitating also the update of some of these very important micro nutrients and minerals. And that would address to sum up would address all the crisis that I presented in the beginning from the land degradation the climate change, the productivity issue but also the nutrition crisis. So, to conclude, we need to have a better understanding of the relationships between plant functional traits and agricultural system processes and services. I work, I don't work with soil scientists understand how my different systems in my different with varieties interact with the soil. And we need also to understand better how functional diversity influence agricultural system processes and services so from the genetic diversity from proper rotation from intercropping, so that we can design production system that have more diversity at this level and that interactive crop rotation and intercropping we heard from the first year from the first day of this symposium, how having more, more crops in the rotation actually help improving the biodiversity of the soil so we need to take all these into account in our research. And of course how we can have a better understanding on the household biodiversity can be managed to improve human nutrition. And thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much. Dr Fada, that was wonderful. We have had many questions come in about your presentation, and we will address some of those. And after our last speaker, we appreciate your, your presentation very much. Our next speaker, who I'd like to bring up is Mr Dylan Warren Marafa. Mr Dylan currently works with the FAO. And he is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Agribiodiversity in Agribiodiversity, excuse me, at Sonana School of Advanced Studies. Mr Rafa, the floor is yours. Yes Monika. Thank you very much. Can you hear me. Can you see my screen. Yes, both. Great, fantastic. So thank you very much. And then good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone. I'm really happy to be here and having this opportunity to share the work that they have been doing in the last year with Michael League Jennifer Kenser and Uncle Daski. And on the effects and the impact of co-production practices on soil microbiome, and on their implication for ecosystem health from climate change and for human wellbeing. So, let me start with a brief introduction. We know that you might be facing multiple challenges. We know that we have to face challenges such as malnutrition, biodiversity laws, natural resource degradation, and all of this under the threatening pressure of climate change. But what is emerged in the last, let's say the game in the last years that we believe being very interesting is that those challenges are interdependent, and hence we should not try to take them in isolation. When we talk about interdependencies, we, for instance, know that malnutrition is a fertile ground for noncommunicable diseases, or for instance that agricultural production can definitely play a role in security but also causes biodiversity losses and natural degradation. When looking for alternative explanations to understand the relationship between those challenges, we in FAO start to work, start to focus on the role of microbiome as a missing link. What's that? Well, because when we focus on the agri-food systems, it's actually clear that the microbiome is quite different, and also that interacts along the agri-food system, as you can see. So it goes from the soil microbiome, which will be the focus of this presentation, the animal microbiome, the plant, the aquatic, up to the food until the human gut microbiome. So, as an informal FAO microbiome working group, we started to work on a series of review of those microbiomes in order to actually investigate what evidences are there on the role of microbiome on ecosystem services, ecosystem functions and human health. So let me briefly say that obviously this work is very much interdisciplinary and frameworks like such as the One Health is definitely of help, and also that this work is very much linked to at least those five sustainable developments. So overall, in the work we are carrying out as a FAO microbiome working group, we certainly wanted to come up with studies with reviews which were quite comprehensive on the soil microbiome, on the microbiome general. But the real aim is actually to build a process, a process that based on science, promote debates with the overarching goal of informing policies. And today, I will just talk about a few key message that emerged from the work we've been carried out on soil, where we actually explore the connections between production systems, the climate and the human health from the perspective of the soil microbiome. So to this hand we actually use a pretty diversified methodology. For instance, we started with negative literature to review as a descriptive tool of the role of soil microbiome on ecosystem services and climate change. We also work on what is the effects of farming practices on soil microbiome. And we also use the systematic literature to review. Here we wanted to focus more on the interlinkages between practices microbiome and climate change and human health. When I say interlinkages basically I mean if the farming practices change the soil microbiome in a way that the climate change or the human health is affected. Last, but not the least, we carry out a series of photo troops, we put together microbiome experts from research from industry and from policies. The idea was to obviously discuss our findings, but also create a momentum, reach a consensus and plant future collective and very interdisciplinary work. But let me directly maybe jump into a few key messages of the review and so on. Firstly, we highlighted that we found very strong evidences of the key role of soil microbiome in providing a very wide set of ecosystem services and on mediating chemical cycles related to climate change in terms of greenhouse gas emission and carbon storage. Despite that, we concluded our current knowledge to not actually precisely allow us to predict how she's in microbiome can affect the release for instance of greenhouse gas emissions. Concerning practices we found very detailed evidences of the effects of certain practices on the soil microbiome and on the consequent effects of on soil functionality on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage. I'm thinking for instance about the crop diversification strategies that kind of what I was referring for. In our work and especially as a result of the other groups that we carry out. We identified several opportunities and research needs. I'm not going into into the detail now, but I mean the report will be released in a month time or less and there you can definitely find much more detailed information. Concerning the human health. We did not really found the clear evidence on direct links between soil microbiome and human health, but it's certain that the conceptual framework is there, and therefore we agree that this is definitely worth it will continue to investigate on this on this topic. But not the least, the interdisciplinary nature of soil microbiome obviously calls for interdisciplinary collaboration, which are definitely critical in this on this topic. So, as a result of our work we work we obviously identify that we have a huge diversity of genes and functions in the soil microbiome. We actually do not know that much. It strikes me all the time when I think that we know only about 1% of soil biodiversity in general so we know even less in terms of soil microbiome, but still, we are statistically able to see a significant effects of those microbiome so you can imagine the opportunity that we are talking about. And actually the market seems quite responsive on this. You can see this figure and it's absolutely clear that the private sector is also moving forward and this figure are actually expected to grow farther in the next in the next years. Okay, from a practical point of view. Now the question is, what do we do with this information. How do we make those information viable. And what we notice is that we basically have two kinds of approaches. The first approach, which is very much focused on. The second approach is very much linked to inoculates, basically adding microbes or adding substances which favors the activity and metabolism of microbes and what we noticed in our in our interactions with the inoculates is that the debate gets very often priced people arguing that we need more practices, people are doing more products. The point that we really want to make here is that those approaches are mutually exclusive, and that those approaches are rather extremely complimentary, and they're both needed in order to really exploit the full potential of the soil microbiome. Rafa, you have one minute. Yes, thank you very much. That's actually my last slide. And so let me conclude with a couple of recommendation for policies which I want to stress emerge from our focus groups and from interaction we had with microbiome experts from academia from policy and from private sector. And those groups identified that policies should actually create an environment for the use and announcement of the soil microbiome in our culture. And this definitely entails public support for research, as well as for business opportunities. We also need to raise awareness on very happy to be here today. We are kind of contributing to this, this goal on the key role played by the soil microbiome. And then we definitely need a regulatory framework and enabling also technical framework, which can promote farming practices which can regulate products. Which recognize the value and foster the activity of soil microbiome in our culture. Last, let me say that during this process, we, I fail was actually recognized as a really reliable intermediary, which was kind of able to put together the scientific community with policy maker, in order to bring tangible changing to the food system to the So with this I thank you very much for for your attention and give back the floor to Monica. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much, Mr Rafa. We are going to go straight into our next speaker because we are running a little short on time right now. I'm Dr. Alberto, or Gazi. Currently works in with the Europeans Commission joint research center. He is currently heading the Lucas soil biodiversity survey, which is a large scale campaign supported by the European Commission. And I will now turn the floor over to you, Dr or Gazi. And mute yourself. Okay, can you hear me. I can. And see my presentation. Yes, perfect. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to be with you and to present a bit what I'm, what I'm doing in the next 10 minutes or so. I'm telling you something about large scale assessment on soil biodiversity, what we have and what we miss. So probably if you have attended a soil biodiversity conference or workshop meeting, whatever, in the next few in the past few years, you have seen scientists starting the presentation like this. So soil biodiversity is very important, but unfortunately we don't know much about it. I used to start my presentation like that, but then I realized, wait, wait a second, this is not true. So I need to take a step back, rewind and start again my presentation. This is my first slide for today. So soil biodiversity is very important, of course, and we have to say that thanks to the great efforts of many research groups from all over the planet. We know a lot of things about about it. For instance, we know the function and services provided by soil biodiversity, like food, the importance in agriculture, food production, also climate regulation, as already mentioned, also for medicines discovery. Now it's quite a hot topic this one and soil biodiversity can be a very important reservoir of new antibiotics for instance. We also know also the factors that shaped soil biodiversity like the soil, like the soil physical chemical properties, like also climate vegetations. Of course, we also know the threats, the risk that affects soil biodiversity from the most generic one like climate change to the most specific like soil erosion. There was a good insight on the distribution of soil biodiversity. That was not the case five years ago when the European Commission together with the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative published the first ever Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas. Because being an Atlas, we had to produce a global map of soil biodiversity and I have to say that was quite a challenge to do that because basically there were no data at large scale. So again, we were able as you see in my slide to produce the first map of soil biodiversity, but we use some unpublished data, proxy data like microbial biomass, so not real biodiversity data. However, the Atlas had an important message, so they needed to do more research on the distribution of soil biodiversity and actually that's what happened over the last five years. Now indeed we have so many maps, global maps of the distribution of different types of soil organisms from microbes like bacteria, fungi, but also nematodes, earthworms as you can see in my slide. So one can argue that now we know everything about, there is a lot of research going on, we know everything, many things about soil biodiversity, but I think that there is something that is still missing, there is something that we don't know yet about soil biodiversity. What is missing is ad hoc conservation policy targeting soil biodiversity. One can say of course we are already protecting soil biodiversity, while we protect above ground biodiversity, at the same time we are also protecting soil. That's not really true. Thanks to the maps that I showed before, the new maps, we were able to see that there are no overlap between hot spots of above ground and below ground biodiversity. So if we are protecting above ground biodiversity, not always we are protecting also the life in the soil, so this means that specific action to protect soil biodiversity are needed. And from a scientific point of view, this means that basically we need monitoring plan schemes on soil biodiversity. Indeed, if you want to protect biodiversity, whatever biodiversity you need to monitor biodiversity. Is that the case, for example, of large mammals like the panda? So we know where the panda lives, is habitat, we can monitor. If it changes then we can, for example, reshape national parks and boundaries of national park reserves to better protect this kind of animal. This is not happening for soil biodiversity. For instance, this is a fangus, Pleurotus nebordensis, that is found, is known to be found only in the northern part of Sicily in Italy. However, there is not a monitoring plan on it and not even a specific policy conservation to protect this organism. So this demonstrate the importance to start developing large and small, also small scale, like in Sicily, monitoring scheme plans for biodiversity. This will have a double advantage. One, from a research point of view, we will be able to answer important questions like extension risk associated to soil biodiversity. So far the researcher on this field basically was very, very limited. We know a few about this, but if we are able to assess the risk, we are also able to identify possible species that are endangered, so in risk of extinction. And from the other side, monitoring will also allow to develop some indicators, specific indicators for soil biodiversity. That is a key element if we want that soil biodiversity enter into the policy arena. So policy makers need indicators to monitor the effect, the impact of their decisions. Luckily, the situation is improving. There are many ongoing initiatives to start monitoring soil biodiversity, some at the regional scale. Instead, the case of the Lucas soil survey in Europe, but there are also other initiatives in Africa, China, also in Australia, and probably also other initiatives that I'm not aware of. Let me just say a few things about Europe. I'm working for the European Commission, in particular in this big survey at the European scale called the Lucas soil biodiversity survey. We started three years ago in 2018, collecting about 1,000 samples across Europe. We are now repeating this sampling, so the idea is really to launch, to have the first monitoring plan for soil biodiversity in Europe. Of course, this will allow to contribute to research but also to policy and in particular the new European biodiversity strategy for 2030. All the data and also the protocol that we are using for this sampling and analysis of the soil samples are available online, open access. You can easily access them on our website, the European soil data portal. Just Google soil data Europe and the first results will lead you to our website where you can find all the information. There are also, of course, initiative and more global scale. It's like the case of the newborn, almost newborn soil boine, which is the soil biodiversity observation network. As you can see, there are many actors involved from all over the planet. It's coordinated by the IDIV in Germany, the German Center for Biodiversity, and the idea is really to have a global scheme plan for monitoring soil biodiversity. We already proposed some list of possible indicators that can be developed using this network. Again, this is an open network. You can easily join, just Google, search soil boine and register. You'll be updated and you can also actually contribute by collecting soil samples and helping us. So my last slide, just to summarize, so as I said, we will need in the future the development of large and small scale monitoring scheme. It's important to find a trade off in the scientific communities. There is a long debate on how is the best way to monitor soil biodiversity. I think it's also, mine is a call to a scientist. We need to find an agreement. It's time to move on. Probably there is not the best soil biodiversity indicator, but if there are, the alternative is not to enter in the policy arena, I think it's better to find a deal. The effort should be global. Otherwise, of course, we risk just to have data from Europe, the United States, Australia, so just big countries, but we also need data from other Africa, Asia, South America. So we need to have a simple method that can be easily applied all over the world. This will allow, of course, to develop concrete recommendation for soil biodiversity like the creation of a red list for soil organisms to achieve what is the final goal of this kind of initiative that is protecting soil biodiversity, having specific policy for soil biodiversity. And that's it. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Okay, I'm going to introduce our last speaker, Dr. Andrey Zaitsev, who I actually, I know his work from soil mice, which I also work with. Dr. Andrey Zaitsev currently is currently holds an appointment at the Severitsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Dr. Zaitsev, when you are ready, you have the floor. So thank you very much indeed. I'm ready. Do you see the screen. I do, if you could. Yes, perfect. Okay, thanks a lot for the excellent introduction. So I'm very happy to see all the colleagues and please consider this presentation as some sort of the follow up for the albertas one because though indeed we need to study soil biodiversity globally. So important not to forget about that actually it is formed locally. So that anyway, the biodiversity is defined by many drivers, and we can divide them into ecological and macro geographic ones so while ecological ones are dependent on the environmental and biotech factors influencing any community. The macro geographic drivers are solely associated with the large scale heat and moisture exchange effects across the planet. So, in terms of soil biodiversity, the impact of macro geographic gradients receive some attention of the past few decades ecological factors are clearly well better studied. The interactions unfortunately are still rarely addressed and moreover, if we talk about diverse disturbances and intensive management, they can really eliminate and level out the effects of the factors that are normally considered to be the leading ones in defining soil biodiversity. So overall, if we talk about different drivers different factors, they each of them is acting most intensively at a certain scale. And those, this is the concept scheme, how approximately are they arranged if we talk about a community. Further, I will present few examples mainly on the minds but also on some other groups, what comes up if we take into account the scheme. And the first example is about the large transect we've been studying in Europe, covering both spruce and decisions forests in seven regions in five countries. And there we started two groups, those were T-State Amoeba and Oribetamides, and surprisingly, for example, the forest type didn't really determine too much of the soil biodiversity level for these two groups. And they were also resembling to each other. What brings us to the question what are the actual drivers defining the diversity. I think we don't see some consistent gradients as one would expect when starting transects. And for the T-State Amoeba, indeed throughout this area, the species regions, the total diversity was dependent on the organic layer while some traits, diversity of some traits of them were defined by the different factors. For the Oribetamides, it was even more complicated because the overall richness didn't really depend on the macrogeography, but then we really could discover the different ecological drivers define diversity of different traits. And this is important to understand that when monitoring the overall diversity, this trait approach can be highly informative and add additional explanations to the patterns that we find in space. If we talk about smaller gradients, then sometimes really strange things can be the leading ones, and we started also Oribetamides in the Netherlands, where there is a clear gradient of the geological age increase coming from the coast to the inland area. And this resulted in the fact that actually the older, the geologically older landscapes we examined, the more species we found. And in fact, this was not really dependent on the soil type. The trait, the trend was quite consistent in the sand and clay soils, but at the same time there was again the very strong contribution of different traits into explaining this, that for example, the sexually reproducing mites were the ones that actually define this ascending trend in the diversity. So at the more local scale, for example, if we change our forests, if we change a forest type from the mixed forest into a modern culture, we can also lose some part of the diversity simply because the more widely distributed species that are also ecologically more more tolerant and more plastic, they seem to prevail. And the species with the smaller ranges, they seem not to benefit from such conditions, while when it is converted back to the mixed forest, the share and the overall diversity of the species that can be called endemic, they also increase. So it's important to understand that this micromosaic of the habitats can really help increase the diversity at the local scale. Disturbances, they also make their contribution, and unfortunately normally the quite negative one into first this explanatory value of different environmental drivers and especially macrogeography. This was started along another trendset in European Russia, where we compared burnt and unburned forests. And what was quite striking here that actually the effect of fire really reduces the better diversity of might communities in this forest, meaning that disturbances, especially heavy disturbances can really strongly equalize the macrogeographic patterns and macrogeographic gradient effects on the diversity of the certain soil taxa. So overall, if we consider all this over and both set of filters, we can say that each of them has their place in the system, depending on the scale and the scale of the most effective action, as we call it. And at the same time, the degree they can affect the community really changes with the largest effect of the locally acting disturbances and ecological factors that can totally level out the effect of the macrogeographic gradients. So to conclude, we can say that the study of geographic gradients requires a programmed coverage and spatial resolution to avoid unnecessary stochasticity induced by locally acting ecological factors. Ecological drivers may strongly override geographic patterns locally by the order of magnitude. So this is something to be considered very seriously in the future. And the simplification of micro and macro habitat structure and unification of edific parameters after disturbances reduces the effect of macrogeographic gradients. That was it. Thank you very much for attention. I think I made it in terms of time. You totally made it. It is, it is now two o'clock exactly. Thank you so much. We unfortunately are out of time right now. And if you have seen questions in the chat speakers that are for you, please go ahead and answer those. I was going to quickly say that we had at our peak this morning 1900 participants, which is amazing. I am now going to turn over to Isabel, they're Becky, who is going to talk about how to get into the parallel sessions this morning. Monica. A few information. First of all, I would like to inform you all that given the few complaints we received yesterday on the absence of interpretation for the yesterday session power has made an effort. And we'll ensure interpretation for the tomorrow crossing session in both Spanish and French. We sincerely apologize for the Arabic Chinese and Russian speakers but it was impossible to find interpreters for those three languages on such a short notice. I will now briefly explain you how to join the parallel session for the participant who attended yesterday plenary session, you may just skip this intro and join directly your parallel session. Well, for the next two hours we will all split into six different parallel sessions structure around 90 presentation well today about 50 4050 presentation. You can switch between parallel session as many time as you like and attend the presentation that interests you the most. Your camera will be on but you will not be able to unmute yourself. If you want to intervene raise your question on the chat and the moderator we select some key question and open the discussion. Now how to enter the parallel session. You can refer to the email that was sent to you recently with a subject attending the symposium. It has a lot of details on how to join those four days. The alternative is also to simply enter the symposium website. My colleague is now posting the URL on the chat. Let me quickly share my screen. So, you just click here. That's a homepage. Join the symposium. Here you can. You just need to click on each image that indicates a different part of session type in the right passcode and simply join the parallel session. Very quickly also remember that the agenda of parallel session is available here from the home page you have a virtual agenda and a notable agenda for you. And regarding a certificate we receive a lot of requests also certificates will be granted upon participation to the four days of the symposium. There's a message on the GSB mailbox so we can check the participation log and and don't forget to check also the GSB website here under resources we are gradually uploading all the recording and the presentation so take a look there. And that's it. I hope everything was clear and I see you all in the final session now. Thank you.