Changing the culture of ecology from the ground up

Abstract

We are two early career soil ecologists in academia who entered the field of soil ecology with the goal of studying soil-climate feedbacks to make meaningful contributions to climate change mitigation. Although our training and research extensively focused on the effects of climate change on soil ecosystems, we were not trained during our PhD nor incentivized as postdocs to work on solutions for climate change mitigation. So the question we ask here is: Given the consensus among ecologists about the urgency of the climate crisis, why is our field not promoting more solutions-oriented research in training and practice? In this commentary, we provide our perspective on (1) the way forward shown by individual soil ecologists doing solutions-oriented research, (2) some specific cultural barriers to academic institutional support, and (3) three examples promoting solutions-oriented science that improve support for early career researchers and reduce barriers to entry.