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= Soil legacy effect = Soil legacy effects, or more simply, legacy effects are an ecological term for indirect and long-term effects of terrestrial ecological disturbances mediated by belowground ecosystems. These effects are known to happen when events such as logging, fires, and other human activities exert disturbances on the belowground component of ecosystems, which then go on to influence subsequent aboveground communities, indirectly affecting temporally separated organisms.

This idea is based on aboveground-belowground interactions: interactions between aboveground organisms such as plants, insects, and mammals and belowground organisms such as soil bactera, soil fungi, and soil invertebrates. These interactions are known to play fundamental roles in controlling ecosystem processes and properties, and their understanding is imperative for predicting ecosystem responses to human-induced ecological disturbances.

Examples of soil legacy effects

 * Lodgepole pine Pinus contorta seedlings grown in soils inoculated with microbes from lodgepole pine forests which had received disturbance by logging or salvage logging, showed lower biomass or lower height, compared to seedlings grown in non-disturbed lodgepole forest soil inocula.
 * In Alaskan forests, fires with higher severity lead to increased dominance of deciduous tree species instead of the currently dominant black spruce Picea mariana through disturbances on the surface organic layer.

Implications
The influecne of belowground organisms are known to extend indirectly to higher orders of the aboveground ecosystem e.g. through plants, to herbivores, and than to their predators. This implies that ecological disturbances can exert long-term and cascading influences on the above-ground ecosystem through legacy effects. Therefore, knowledge of the mechanisms of legacy effects should be essential for the effective restoration and conservation of ecologically disturbed sites, and studies to this end are imperative for the impact mitigation of human-induced ecological disturbances.

= References =