Профиль участника
Д-р. Roy Neilson
Организация:
The James Hutton Institute
Страна:
Соединенное Королевство
Область (области) знаний:
Д-р. Roy Neilson
The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself – Franklin D Roosevelt (1937)
These are insightful words that until recently have largely remained unheeded.
Soil is a key asset of natural capital, providing goods and services that sustain life through the support of food production, but with impacts beyond agricultural systems such as provision and promotion of biodiversity, carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation. It is therefore perplexing that soils have been significantly undervalued as an asset (Panagos et al., 2016).
Compounded with an ever-burgeoning global population, the area of soil usable for cultivation declined from 0.32 to 0.25 ha per capita between 1975 and 2000. The maintenance of food security delivered by a sustainable intensification of agriculture (Tilman et al., 2010) is arguably the greatest global challenge (Godfray et al., 2010). However, due to agricultural intensification, degradation threats to soils are numerous (Banwart, 2011; Powlson et al. 2011) with degradation estimated to extend to between 1-6 billion ha globally (Gibbs and Salmon, 2015).
Soils are a complex system delivered by a nexus of biology, chemistry and physics. The biodiversity of the soil system is the engine that drives the numerous processes that deliver the numerous ecosystem services including food production. The technological advances in recent decades has provided the opportunity for initial understanding of the interactions and couplings of the tripartite nexus. However, there is so much more to learn and with a plethora of anthropogenic derived impacts such as a changing climate there is a clear imperative for soil biodiversity in an agricultural context to have a core research focus to underpin and improve food security.
1) Biodiversity is an important contributor to food security and improved nutrition and 2) All agricultural sectors (crop and livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture) rely on biodiversity and on the ecosystem functions and services, they underpin. At the same time, these sectors may affect biodiversity through various direct and indirect drivers.
Forward thinking policymakers have recognised this need. For example, in Scotland, the devolved government has funded a 5 year (2016-2021) strategic research programme which amongst a diverse research portfolio on soils includes a research deliverable “Soil and its Ecosystem Function”, that seeks to characterise soil biodiversity identifying its key roles in ecosystem processes in particular carbon and nutrient cycling; the contribution of soil physical and chemical properties and processes to ecosystem functions and the role and importance of soil in sustaining above-ground biodiversity in different systems and habitats including fragile ecosystems (e.g. Paterson et al., 2011; Ghee et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2014; Vink et al., 2014; O’Callaghan et al., 2018).
4) The importance of biodiversity for improved food security and better nutrition is not always evident to those engaged in agricultural sectors.
My personal research aligns with the overarching aims of The Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, which I am a member, seeks to promote the translation of expert knowledge on soil biodiversity into environmental policy and sustainable land management for the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services. A current example of this is a national scale project (SoilBio, funded by Innovate UK) which seeks to develop with industry partners a tool that can be deployed on-farm to assess soil health and thereby inform farmers of potential positive management interventions to sustainably maximise yield. By project end, we will have characterised approximately 30 parameters encompassing the nexus of soil biology (soil nematode communities), chemistry and physics for c. 6000 soil samples across the UK in the context of management strategies and resource inputs. In the specific context of this project, to raise awareness of soil biodiversity related issues we engage directly with farmers and national associations through delivery of workshops and meetings. Furthermore, organisations such as the Sustainable Soils Alliance (https://sustainablesoils.org/) directly engage with policymakers, and is working to bring together all stakeholders in soil health to create a forum to influence positive change, identify beneficial policy principles and create the frameworks that will support the development of healthy soil for future generations.
References
Banwart. 2011. Save our soils. Nature 474, 151-152.
Chen et al. 2014. Long-term effects of P fertiliser on soil microbial and nematode community structure in a grazed grassland, in relation to nutrient stoichiometry. Soil Biology & Biochemistry, 75, 94-101.
Ghee et al. 2013. Priming of soil organic matter mineralisation is intrinsically insensitive to temperature. Soil Biology & Biochemistry, 66, 20-28.
Gibbs and Salmon. 2015. Mapping the world’s degraded lands. Applied Geography, 57, 12-21.
Godfray et al. 2010. Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science 327, 812-818.
O’Callaghan et al. 2018. A new approach for screening plant-nematode interactions in the rhizosphere. Scientific Reports, 8, 1440.
Panagos et al. 2016. Soil conservation in Europe: wish or reality? Land Degradation & Development 27, 1547–1551.
Paterson et al. 2011. Altered food web structure and C-flux pathways associated with mineralisation of organic amendments to agricultural soil. Applied Soil Ecology, 48, 107-116.
Powlson et al. 2011. Soil management in relation to sustainable agriculture and ecosystem services. Food Policy 36, S72-S87.
Tilman et al. 2010. Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108, 20260-20264.
Vink et al. 2014. Temporal and land use effects on soil bacterial community structure of the machair, an EU Habitats Directive Annex 1 low-input agricultural system. Applied Soil Ecology, 73, 116-123.