Top-down consumptive and trait-mediated control do affect soil food webs: It's time for a new model

- The inclusion of top-down effects in soil food web models can be improved.
- Trait-mediated effects can have an underappreciated impact on soil food webs.
- The ability to alter the way we group taxa is critical for modeling top-down control.

Soil food webs are complex and exhibit many of the features that are indicative of bottom-up or resource control. The perceived dominance of bottom-up control has resulted in food web models that have underexplored mechanisms of top-down or predator control. Developing soil food web models that include more mechanisms of top-down control may improve our ability to predict changes in food web configurations and ecosystem processes. Specifically, models could be improved by considering more detailed density-mediated and trait-mediated top-down effects via the inclusion of non-linear feeding relationships and context-specific variation in physiology, morphology, and behavior.