Raquel Juan Ovejero (PhD in Methodology and Applications in Life Sciences, 2020) is an early-career researcher devoted to investigating how biotic and abiotic factors can interact with each other and ultimately affect key ecosystem functions. She has published 7 papers (6 of them as first author) in WoS-indexed Q1 journals in the fields of soil science, environmental science and forestry. During her PhD at the Universidade de Vigo (Spain), she conducted a long sampling campaign during 2.5 years to study how changes in environmental conditions and in soil and plant communities affected the carbon cycling of the southernmost blanket bogs complex of Europe. She processed thousands of soil samples, which allowed her to develop high qualified skills on soil mesofauna identification (i.e. enchytraeids, mites and springtails). The main conclusion of her PhD thesis was that the direct effects of abiotic factors (soil temperature and soil moisture) on biotic communities (plants, soil fauna and microorganisms) determine the magnitude of carbon losses in peatlands. After her PhD, she worked as a research associate at the Universidad de Granada (Spain), where she used a combination of ecological knowledge and remote-sensing techniques to investigate the resilience of Mediterranean forests in a context of global change. With this project, she contributed to implement the recovery of functional resilient forests at landscape level, but at the same time focused on the biotic and abiotic limitations for the establishment of young seedlings at an individual-plant scale. She has recently joined the Centre for Functional Ecology of the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) as a postdoctoral researcher, where she is studying how the direction of the expansion of eucalypt plantations in southern Europe can affect soil-based ecosystem functions. Hence, this will allow her to identify essential aspects that can help to develop forest management plans to control further expansion of these plantations and thereby reduce their high pressure on native forests. Overall, she has acquired a wide range of abilities related to the ecology of forests and peatlands. While taking steps forward with her research, she has noticed that, nowadays, there are several uncertainties concerning the relative contribution of below- and aboveground interactions to key ecosystem functions in a global change context. Thus, she is seeking to expand knowledge on how land uses and predicted environmental changes like warming and water stress can modulate the dynamics of soil biota and plant communities as well as the nutrient cycling and carbon storage capacity of terrestrial ecosystems.