Declining soil pH reduces microbial biomass-driven soil multifunctionality

Soil acidification due to climate and anthropogenic changes persistently threatens biodiversity and biomass, the essential drivers of ecosystem multifunctionality. However, the influence of a sustained reduction in soil pH on the regulatory role of microbial communities in ecosystem multifunctionality has not yet been assessed. Here, we investigated the critical pH thresholds at which microbial biomass becomes a key determinant of soil multifunctionality (SMF) based on a large-scale paddy field study (n = 429) and a global dataset (n = 35,641). We found that when the soil pH was