Rhizosphere: so many achievements and even more challenges

The story of this “Rhizosphere book project” started about 3 years ago, as the three of us were discussing the organization of the “International Rhizosphere 2 Conference” held in Montpellier in 2007 (Hartmann et al. 2008a; Jones and Hinsinger 2008). At one point of this conversation, we noticed that previous text books related to rhizosphere—though remarkable— only dealt with partial aspects of rhizosphere knowledge, e.g. rhizosphere and plant nutrition (Marschner 1995), rhizosphere and plant health (Parker et al. 1985), rhizosphere microbiology (Mukerji et al. 2006; Varma et al. 2004), biochemistry (Pinton et al. 2001 and 2007) and ecology (Cardon and Whitbeck 2007), while the more general ones needed significant update, having been published prior to the era of modern molecular biology and molecular microbial ecology (Curl and Truelove 1986; Kesters and Cregan 1989; Lynch 1990). With the above in mind, we decided to contact a number of colleagues all over the world to assess first whether they shared the need for such an update, and second, whether they would contribute to this venture. Their enthusiastic answers definitively prompted us to initiate the project. The aim of this book was to provide a holistic view of the rhizosphere, keeping in mind the pioneer rhizosphere concept of Hiltner (Hartmann et al. 2008b) and its unique functioning that implies numerous, strong and complex interactions between plant roots, soil constituents and microorganisms. Furthermore, this book not only aimed at addressing current knowledge and achievements but also at outlining the future challenges that stand in front of rhizosphere sciences. We, as editors, therefore rapidly faced the difficulty to tackle, as much as possible, all these facets of rhizosphere knowledge in a single book. A meeting of the three editors at a cafe in Paris Quartier Latin led to the definition of the current structure of the book, with five sections covering soil sciences to microbial ecology, plant sciences to biotechnology. The first section of this book describes rhizosphere as a central component of ecosystems and Plant Soil (2009) 321:1–3 DOI 10.1007/s11104-009-0063-5