Unsustainable soil management, climate change, and land degradation jeopardize soil biodiversity and soil‐mediated ecosystem functions. Although the transition from conventional to organic agriculture has been proposed as a potential solution to alleviate these pressures, there is limited evidence of its effectiveness in enhancing belowground biodiversity across different biogeographical regions, climates, and land degradation...

Aim Improving nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is critical for enhancing the sustainability of agricultural grasslands. However, there is limited research assessing NUE of grasslands managed with different nitrogen (N) fertilization inputs. We tested the hypothesis that multispecies swards managed with the combination of chemical and organic fertilizer would perform best with respect to herbage N yield and NUE. Methods A grasslan...

Soil nematode communities and food web indices can inform about the complexity, nutrient flows and decomposition pathways of soil food webs, reflecting soil quality. Relative abundance of nematode feeding and life‐history groups are used for calculating food web indices, i.e., maturity index (MI), enrichment index (EI), structure index (SI) and channel index (CI). Molecular methods to study nematode communities potentially off...

Understanding the impacts of agricultural intensification and extensification on soil biota communities is useful in order to preserve and restore biological diversity in agricultural soils and enhance the role of soil biota in agroecosystem functioning. Over four consecutive years, we investigated the effects of agricultural intensification and extensification (including conversion of grassland to arable land and vice versa,...