Phosphorus is essential for life. While the scientific community has long recognized that the availability of phosphorus can regulate rates of fundamental ecosystem processes, an emerging area of multidisciplinary research examines the role of phosphorus in affecting terrestrial plant and microbial community composition and diversity, as well as the importance of interactions between phosphorus and the cycling of elements such as iron, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. This session synthesizes these new perspectives in phosphorus research, and provides novel insight and integrated approaches to a globally-relevant topic. Inspired by the 2017 Annual Meeting’s theme, the organized session described here highlights some of the most inspiring recent advances in phosphorus science and their links with biological and biogeochemical diversity. These advances are both interesting and directly related to global change factors; for instance, as encompassed by the talks, phosphorus cycling is not only affected by small-scale changes in environmental conditions, but is itself an anthropogenic driver of change. Recent research suggests that phosphorus strongly regulates both plant and microbial community composition and diversity. This control over community structure represents a previously underappreciated role of phosphorus in terrestrial ecosystems. Moreover, new research suggests that controls over phosphorus cycling may be equally diverse, with many elements interacting to regulate the availability of phosphorus. In order to bring together these perspectives, we invited a truly phenomenal list of phosphorus experts, spanning multiple scientific fields and continents. The research conducted by the speakers highlights the complexity of terrestrial phosphorus cycling, and underscores the importance of combining the scientific approaches and viewpoints used in the showcased talks. For example, research described here takes molecular, laboratory, field, and modeling approaches to elucidate the factors that control phosphorus and, in turn, the factors that phosphorus controls. Importantly, phosphorus has been regularly cited in recent research as playing a key role in determining how ecosystems respond to a host of global changes. Thus, our limited understanding of terrestrial phosphorus cycling not only hinders our current perspectives on how ecosystems function, but also our capacity to consider and predict how ecosystems will respond to change. In sum, this session represents an exciting joining of phosphorus cycling perspectives that span multiple scales, relate to current issues of change, and have origins in biological and biogeochemical diversity. We believe the session offers an unparalleled opportunity to synthesize recent advances in phosphorus cycling and would be of great interest to the ESA community.