Climate change alters plant and soil communities, as well as processes and interactions in the plant-soil food web. These changes posethreats to biodiversity and key ecosystem functions such as productivity and carbon and nutrient cycling. To predict how biodiversityand ecosystem functioning will respond to future climatic changes, and how these changes will feed back to the climate system,profound knowledge of climate impacts on underlying ecological responses, processes, mechanisms, and interactions in the plant-soilfood web is needed. FUNDER will assess and disentangle the direct effects of climate from the indirect effects, mediated through bioticinteractions, on the diversity and whole-ecosystem functioning of the plant−soil food web.To achieve this, we use a powerful macroecological experimental approach to quantify the impacts of vegetation diversity oninteractions and ecosystem functioning across factorial broad-scale temperature and precipitation gradients. This will allow us to gain aholistic understanding of ecosystem responses to climate change, including non-additive effects, context-dependencies acrosslandscapes, compensatory effects and climate mismatches that may lead to disruption of biotic interactions.Towards this end, FUNDER brings together an optimal team of researchers with complementary skills and expertise from five world-classresearch institutions in Norway and abroad to develop new approaches in global change, ecosystem, conservation ecology and earthsystem modelling with important applications and benefits for both basic science and applied climate change research. The research ismade possible, and provides added value, through exploiting an existing Norwegian experimental infrastructure. The project leadershipand partners have excellent track records in relevant fields, and FUNDER will significantly strengthen the research cluster and providecareer opportunities for early-career researchers.