PERSPECTIVE Soil Microbial Communities and Restoration Ecology:

Microorganisms have critical roles in the functioning of soil in nutrient cycling, structural formation, and plant interactions, both positive and negative. These roles are important in reestablishing function and biodiversity in ecosystem restoration. Measurement of the community indicates the status of the system in relation to restoration targets and the effectiveness of management interventions, and manipulation of the community shows promise in the enhancement of the rate of recovery of degraded systems. Soilmicrobes ranging from free-living bacte-ria to single fungi covering several squarekilometers are a vastly diverse group in terms of taxonomy, structure, and function. We know the biology of few species directly be-cause most soil microbes are cur-rently impossible to cultivate (less than 1 % grow readily on agar plates), and we instead rely on in-direct means of analyses, princi-pally biochemical markers, and measurements of the whole, or se