Soil health reflects the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans and is hence key to all soil provision services. Abundance and activity of soil fauna and microbial communities determine soil health, but are sensitive to human perturbances such as contamination or land-use change, and to shifting environmental boundary conditions such as soil moisture or temperature. Hence, biological indicators signal the response of the soil to climate-change induced changes. However, to date, soil biological and physical attributes are heavily underrepresented in European and national soil monitoring programmes. Correspondingly, the commission Bodenschutz (Soil protection) of the Umweltbundesamt strongly emphasizes the need for implementation of a federal soil biological monitoring program to systematically detect changes in soil health.
The objective of BIOS is to analyse the site-specific response of key soil mesofauna species, microbial community composition and bulk processes such as soil respiration to variations in soil moisture and temperature, and hence boundary conditions directly impacted by climate change.
Project partners:
BIOS is funded by the impulse fund of TU Braunschweig: Seed Funding Call Ecosystem.
Contact: Prof. Dr. Julia Gebert