In the era of “big data” many macrosystem or global datasets are generated each year, and this trend is increasing. Nowhere is this more noticeable than the recent explosion of physical, chemical, and organismal soil datasets at the global scale. Yet, data availability is only the first step to an integrated global understanding of soils and ecological processes they control. Large datasets themselves present new challenges, such as data curation, scaling, and integration, that must be overcome before spatially and temporally explicit global soil models can be generated. Nevertheless, these challenges are worth meeting as one of the best ways of predicting future ecosystem responses to global change is to understand the mechanisms driving current soil community assembly and functions across disparate environments. Therefore, merging soil physical, chemical, and biological datasets to create mechanistic, process-based ecosystem models is a grand challenge worth pursuing over the next decade.

Here we gather six soil ecologists from disparate disciplines and scientific approaches from ecosystem modelers, to soil biogeochemists, and soil biogeographers to create a unified approach to understanding soil ecosystems at the global scale. Talks will address challenges facing accurate data collection and curation in the field of soil ecology in the big data era (Iversen, Zanne), opportunities for merging large datasets that vary in spatial and temporal resoultion (Cameron, Bond-Lamberty, Kivlin, Ramirez) and the next generation of soil ecology models at the global scale (Averill, Sulman).