“…Indeed, changes in scaling law exponents are generally considered indicators of more fundamental changes in underlying rules (i.e., ‘regime’ shifts) of a system, which for soils, can be shifts in relative aggregate formation versus fragmentation, such as those caused by more fungal agglomeration versus invertebrate burrowing, but also represents a generalized mechanism that can apply to cluster-forming systems more broadly such as networks. Beyond the physical limits of natural patterns (Halley et al 2004), shared scaling patterns across biology and ecology have been generally interpreted as indicators of habitat complexity (Loke and Chisholm 2022), biodiversity maintenance (Ostling et al 2004), entropy (Harte, Umemura, and Brush 2021; Klöffel et al 2022), and comparable solutions to optimizing information flow or conserving energy during system changes or adaptation (West, Brown, and Enquist 1997). As a result, analyses of soils that draw from complex systems theory, such as fractal dimensions of soil aggregate size scaling or power law distributions, or similar long-tailed families including log-normal and exponential arising from partially hierarchical soil aggregation (Tisdall and Oades 1982; Melo, Figueiredo, and Filho 2021), continue to offer integrated information about how soils function and respond to key soil biota, like aggregate fragmentation by invertebrates during niche or nest construction (Maaß, Hückelheim, and Rillig 2019) and formation by associated microbial activity (Maaß, Caruso, and Rillig 2015).…”