In December, our workinggroup members Maarja, Lena and John ended their scientific year with the 1st Conference of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI) in Dijon, France. Under the topic „Assessing Soil Biodiversity and its Role for Ecosystem Services“  the conference was a dynamic international meeting summarizing the current state of knowledge and recent advancements in the science of soil biodiversity. All our participants contributed with a poster to the conference, which had the following titles: “Global diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi – everything is almost everywhere” (John Davison), “Response of AMF diversity to land use change in a grassland ecosystem” (Lena Neuenkamp) and “The MaarjAM database of Glomeromycota implements sequence based classification and collates global distribution data (Maarja Öpik).