AbstractThis chapter addresses the following questions: what determines the scales at which species and food web effects are apparent as process controls, and how the often disparate scales at which organisms operate be linked and system properties are measured? The difficulty of linking species and processes appears to be a consequence of 3 attributes of these systems. The first is that it is difficult to measure, model or understand the contributions of large numbers of species in a functional group, particularly for modulation processes which have residual effects. Secondly, measurements of decomposition, nitrogen mineralization or gas fluxes are integrating measures of community activity. Thirdly, as the dimensions of a system are expanded, processes are increasingly dominated by the biophysical properties of soil organic matter and mineral pools which buffer the effects of organism activities in soil microsites. Two approaches considered for linking microsite and macroscale processes were to analyse the activities of organisms within functional repetitive units, which may be associated with the spatial patterns of plants, litter or animal activities, or to use changes in soil biophysical diversity as a link between soil functioning and community activity.