Enzyme activities as a component of soil biodiversity: A review

Soil enzyme activities are the direct expression of the soil community to metabolic requirements and available nutrients. While the diversity of soil organisms is important, the capacity of soil microbial communities to maintain functional diversity of those critical soil processes through disturbance, stress or succession could ultimately be more important to ecosystem productivity and stability than taxonomic diversity. This review examines selected papers containing soil enzyme data that could be used to distinguish enzyme sources and substrate specificity, at scales within and between major nutrient cycles. Developing approaches to assess soil enzyme functional diversity will increase our understanding of the linkages between resource availability, microbial community structure and function, and ecosystem processes.