Climate-adjusted soil microbiome provenancing: a novel way to increase climate resilience in ecosystem restoration plantings?

Building climate resilience into ecosystem restoration is an adaptation priority for sustainable land management. A well-established approach to achieve this is climate-adjusted seed provenancing – sourcing a mix of local and non-local seeds from populations across a climatic gradient likely to be encountered in the future. However, this strategy has limits as terrestrial ecosystems comprise far more than their vegetation alone. Here, we propose climate-adjusted soil microbiome provenancing – the sourcing and deployment of soil microbiomes from provenances that confer climate resilience to ecosystem being repaired under future conditions – as a complementary, nature-based solution for enhancing the climate resilience of restoration projects. The soil microbiome – the community of bacteria, fungi and other microbes (and its theatre of activity) that drive plant health, nutrient cycling and drought tolerance – remains largely overlooked in restoration science, policy and practice. Extending the climate-adjusted provenancing concept to the microbial domain requires theoretical, laboratory and field development. This approach offers potential to strengthen ecosystem climate resilience by restoring the adaptive capacity of soils – the living foundations of terrestrial ecosystems.