Soil, the living terrestrial skin of the Earth, plays a central role in supporting life and is home to an unimaginable diversity of microorganisms. This review explores key drivers for microbial life in soils under different climates and land-use practices at scales ranging from soil pores to landscapes. We delineate special features of soil as a microbial habitat (focusing on bacteria) and the consequences for microbial communities. This review covers recent modeling advances that link soil physical processes with microbial life (termed biophysical processes). Readers are introduced to concepts governing water organization in soil pores and associated transport properties and microbial dispersion ranges often determined by the spatial organization of a highly dynamic soil aqueous phase. The narrow hydrological windows of wetting and aqueous phase connectedness are crucial for resource distribution and longer range transport of microorganisms. Feedbacks between microbial activity and their immediate environment are responsible for emergence and stabilization of soil structure—the scaffolding for soil ecological functioning. We synthesize insights from historical and contemporary studies to provide an outlook for the challenges and opportunities for developing a quantitative ecological framework to delineate and predict the microbial component of soil functioning.

Microbial activity in soil is spatially heterogeneous often forming spatial hotspots that contribute disproportionally to biogeochemical processes. Evidence suggests that bacterial spatial organization contributes to the persistence of anoxic hotspots even in unsaturated soils. Such processes are difficult to observe in situ at the microscale, hence mechanisms and time scales relevant for bacterial spatial organization remain largely qualitative. Here we develop an experimental platform based on glass-etched micrometric pore networks that mimics resource gradients postulated in soil aggregates to observe spatial organization of fluorescently tagged aerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria. Two initially intermixed bacterial species, Pseudomonas putida and Pseudomonas veronii, segregate into preferential regions promoted by opposing gradients of carbon and oxygen (such persistent coexistence is not possible in well-mixed cultures). The study provides quantitative visualization and modeling of bacterial spatial organization within aggregate-like hotspots, a key step towards developing a mechanistic representation of bacterial community organization in soil pores.

Using a phyllosphere model system, we demonstrated that the term ‘carrying capacity', as it is commonly used in microbial ecology, needs to be understood as the sum of many ‘local carrying capacities' in order to better explain and predict the course and outcome of bacterial colonization of an environment. Using a green fluorescent protein-based bioreporter system for the quantification of reproductive success (RS) in individual Erwinia herbicola cells, we were able to reconstruct the contribution of individual immigrants to bacterial population sizes on leaves. Our analysis revealed that plant foliage represents to bacteria an environment where individual fate is determined by the local carrying capacity of the site where an immigrant cell lands. With increasing inoculation densities, the RS of most immigrants declined, suggesting that local carrying capacity under the tested conditions was linked to local nutrient availability. Fitting the observed experimental data to an adapted model of phyllosphere colonization indicated that there might exist three types of sites on leaves, which differ in their frequency of occurrence and local carrying capacity. Specifically, our data were consistent with a leaf environment that is characterized by few sites where individual immigrants can produce high numbers of offspring, whereas the remainder of the leaf offered an equal number of sites with low and medium RS. Our findings contribute to a bottom–up understanding of bacterial colonization of leaf surfaces, which includes a quantifiable role of chance in the experience at the individual level and in the outcome at the population level.