Research and development of innovative methods and sensing technologies
Healthy soils provide a broad array of ecosystem services: they sequester carbon, release nutrients and moisture to fuel crop growth, and provide habitat for beneficial organisms, such as mycorrhizal fungi, which directly impact plant fitness. Conservation tillage is often claimed to improve ‘soil health,’ an inherently multidimensional concept; however, most experimental studies focus on just a handful of outcome variables. Thus, there is limited evidence to assess how a change in tillage regime impacts the trade-offs or synergies among different soil-based ecosystem services , or how these trade-offs vary along environmental gradients. Here we propose to conduct a coordinated set of experiments contrasting conventional and no-till agriculture , conducting identical field trials at sites spanning broad ranges of climate and soil properties. We will then assess impacts on a wide range of soil properties: soil aggregate structure and water-holding capacity, nutrient mineralization, greenhouse gas flux, and microbial biomass and diversity. Supporting tasks can include the interrogation of state-of-the-art soil biogeochemical models in reproducing the observed behaviours in the field experiments.
We are looking for potential collaborators across any contributing country that share similar expertise and interests regarding both experimental/laboratory monitoring and modelling.
Imperial College London is a world-class university with a mission to benefit society through excellence in science, engineering, medicine and business. The Institutions represented here are the Grantham Institute and the Department of Environmental Engineering.
