The Konza Prairie is part of an important network of sites where scientists perform long-term research. Click here to learn more.

Have we already discovered all the species? Not by a long shot. In fact, the more deeply science probes into life on Earth, the more apparent it becomes that we've just begun to learn what's there.

When Andrew Parsons joined the staff at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory in Colorado, he knew almost nothing about the life of the soil. But then one of his projects took him to the tall-grass Konza prairie in eastern Kansas. He was working with a taxonomist who specializes in classifying mites.

The scientist offered Parsons a look through her microscope. “It was low magnification,” Parsons recalled later, “perhaps 20 times normal size, and I saw this huge range of different organisms, none of which I’d ever seen before. They were all different shapes and sizes — they all had eight legs, so I knew they were all in the same group of organisms. I had never seen anything like that!”

Mark St. John had a similar experience. The young graduate student works down the hallway from Andy Parsons. For several years he has been exploring the ways in which aboveground biodiversity and belowground biodiversity affect each other. In many hours of peering through microscopes at the organisms he extracted from the soil, he has seen many surprises.

Mark St. John, at one of the microscopes in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. (NREL)

Every day, finding a new species. “When you start looking at them,” he says, “especially the belowground animals, it’s very shocking. I would go home and talk to my friends and family about what I’m doing. And I would describe extracting soil animals from the ground and every day finding a new species, or at least one that’s never been described before.

“And this blows people away. The general idea among most people, I guess, is that we already know all the species on the planet. I think people have the impression that it’s all been done; all the species are in textbooks. We know who they are, we know what they do.

“That’s so far from the truth that it’s amazing. Most of the species on the planet, we have never even seen before.”

Andy Parsons, Mark St. John, and the others at the laboratory do not do what they do — take trips to the prairie, dig up shovelsful of soil, extract small, delicate organisms from what looks like ordinary clumps of dirt, and spend hours at the microscope — just for the excitement of finding new species (although discovering a creature that previously had been unknown to science does give you a certain tingle). They have a broader, more long-range ambition: to somehow figure out the relationships between the diversity we see above Earth’s surface and the still-mysterious diversity of the soil below. It’s an ambition that few scientists have had until recently — until science began to realize that Earth’s health is in danger, and that we haven’t paid proper attention to the part that soil plays in that health.

What, they wonder, will increasing global temperatures do to the denizens of the soil — the primary and secondary consumers, the producers, the decomposers? If higher average air temperature also means higher soil temperature, and if higher soil temperature means dryer soil, how will this affect the nematodes, which require thin films of water in order to live and move? Earth’s population is rising into numbers we’ve never before known. This means we will need a lot more food.

If humankind’s solution to that problem is to cut down more forests and turn them into cropland, how will the diversity of that soil change? And if and when it changes, how will those changes affect the diversity of plant and animal life (including human animal life) above the ground? (Some of these questions will be discussed in the AboutBiodiversity sections on the biodiversity of agriculture and on global climate change.)

How, they wonder, can scientists (and policymakers, and students, and people in general) get a handle on how all these changes, processes, and ongoing events work together? How can we get a handle on the role that humans should play — one that not only avoids hurting Earth’s diversity but also makes it sustainable, makes sure that the great diversity that has made our planet the exciting place it is today will still be there for future generations to enjoy?

Only recently have scientists begun to properly appreciate the importance of whole ecosystems and the relationships among everything that goes into those ecosystems, whether it is plant life, animals, microorganisms, water, air, climate, human impacts, and everything else — and wherever it is, from Kansas to Antarctica to Mongolia. The scientists in Diana Wall’s laboratory at Colorado State are part of what one of them has called “a new breed of global ecologists.” It’s an exciting time to be a scientist, they say. The opportunities are endless.

Dorota Porazinska, who is originally from Poland, is another scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory whose work takes her frequently to the Konza prairie to study protozoa and nematodes. Along the way, she has filled her notebooks with all sorts of observations that may not directly relate to her specialties.

“That's the funny thing with science,” she said one day when she was back in her lab, measuring the growth of prairie plants in a greenhouse. “You get involved in one type of research. You do one experiment that leads you to another experiment that leads you to another experiment. And after a while, you are not back at the original spot. You are branched out.

“The interest and curiosity that we have and that I have leads us away from just doing an experiment and then repeating it. It leads us to something entirely new that we discovered along the path.”

This is the end of the section of the AboutBiodiversity Web site about soil. You can click here to return to the opening page, where you can learn about the most recent additions to the site.