From the ground up: prioritizing soil at the forefront of ecological restoration.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is an opportunity to prioritize soil. Healthy soils facilitate food and water security, assist nutrient cycling, support thriving microbial communities, and act as a carbon sink. Due to lack of awareness of soil importance, resource constraints, and complexity, soil is often overlooked in restoration planning, implementation, and monitoring. Prioritizing soil by placing its restoration and monitoring at the heart of projects will provide the foundation for resilient ecosystems. Soil restoration offers opportunities for interdisciplinary research, enabling inclusive and collaborative solutions to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals of zero hunger, clean water and sanitation, climate action, and life on land. Changing approaches to project funding, increasing people's connection and understanding of soils through education, and creating spaces to discuss soil's importance are ways to raise soil's profile to that of big‐ticket fauna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]