Mycorrhizal fungi, beneficial soil bacteria, and associated predator microbial creatures like nematodes are vital to healthy soils and healthy plants. When I started my journey into the landscape and nursery industry in the 1980’s we treated the soil like a sponge. Like an mass of clay, sand, compost, and nutrients we provided that the plants competed for in the soil. I had never heard of the concept of the ”Wood-Wide Web” (Suzanne Simard), or plants connecting with fungal and bacterial organisms. If there was fungus, we needed to fumigate. If there were weeds or unwanted plants in a garden they were to be pulled or we used herbicides to remove them. I believed we needed to conserve water back then, save natural areas by eliminating invasive species, and I was even excited to see predators put back into the large Yellowstone ecosystem.
I am here to tell you, those were not the right ways to treat the living soil ecosystem. A healthy soil is a highly biodiverse environment. It contains 25% of the Earth's Biodiversity (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2662).
The general idea is that the greater the species diversity in an ecosystem the more resilient it becomes. Ecosystem services, such as pollination, nutrient cycling, and water cleansing require lots of organisms to work properly. Pollination, for instance, if we only had two kinds of bees to pollinate, we may already have crops not being pollinated and society might be starving right now. Thank goodness there are various pollinators. Although, we have really narrowed the number and density of many pollinating insect populations and we need to as a society eliminate insecticides that can harm more than their precise, localized, target. Insecticides not only kill our targeted nemesis or problem insect but, also many other insects and soil organisms are annihilated when they are over-sprayed, accidentally encounter chemicals, or the chemicals move with water into soils or on dead plant matter that moves into the soil as compost. Herbicides have similar affects on soil ecosystems. Synthetic fertilizers kill of these tiny soil organisms as well.
Doctor Elaine Ingham has been studying soil ecosystems and worked on this Paper in 1986.
She currently has many free lectures online. That is where I first discovered her work and concepts. She offers schooling and help becoming a soil analyst to help others. Here is a great chart she refers to often of the soil food web. It is found on her website.
There are many links to get you started on this site. I also highly recommend watching one of her free masterclasses on YouTube. This one I started with. It gives an overview and some case studies from her work over the decades.
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