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Research

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• This troubling new study reports a dramatic 83% decline in earthworm biomass under industrial agricultural methods (tillage and chemical fertilizers) as compared to agroecological methods.

• This beautiful visualisation shows Southern California’s land shift with the emptying and filling of its aquifers  

• Low-tech ways of improving soil quality on farms and rangelands worldwide could pull significant amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and slow the pace of climate change, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study

• Stressed soils absorb less carbon – so drought climate-change related droughts create a vicious cycle

• Stone Age herders improved the grassland ecosystems of ancient African savannahs – and the evidence is visible to this day through biodiversity hotspots

• How maps can help restore degraded land: the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework helps to allocate soil rehabilitation efforts by showing both how degraded the land is, and how well it can recover. Another example of the importance of soil health measurement

• Bacterial soil communities may not be as resilient to drought as previously thought

• A new initiative launches in Australia “to find practical solutions for the nation’s underperforming agricultural soils” through farmer-led research.

• Climate-change induced weather changes are limiting the soil’s capacity to uptake methane.

• Plants are found to differ in their capacity to cooperate with beneficial soil microbes, suggesting plant breeding may be a better way into managing soil-plant relations than attempts at changing soil microbiomes through inoculation, which have ‘largely failed’.

• Exposure to soil and its microbiome results in fewer allergies in mice, with implications for human health.

• Indicators of soil health and soil quality are an important area of research and policy activity, and soil organic carbon is often the go-to; this research finds, however, that different methods of soil organic carbon measurement are not interchangeable, throwing into question existing soil carbon stock accounts.

• More evidence of the importance of the root microbiome to plant’s draught resistance

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Soils in the news

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• The gaos trees in Niger are agents of soil restoration

• Soil removal, soil disposal and soil fill sites are becoming an important environmental concern in Ontario, Canada

 

Editorials, blogs and opinion

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• An interesting overview of land restoration strategies in Africa – including functional ecology, which uses specific vegetation to restore land in targeted ways

• Soil needs animals too; written by Isabella Tree, the inspiring co-owner of a completely rewilded farm in the UK

• This blog entry is an interesting diagnosis of challenges soil scientists need to overcome to make their research more useful to the public: (over)generalisation, (nor communicating) uncertainty, and (not doing) translation into economics models

• To study soils, we need to look… up! An interesting article on canopy soils

• The best way to raise people out of poverty is by working with soil bacteria

• Agroecology is taking root in Ghana with new soil-health oriented farmer training

• A thoughtful essay on online debates about holistic grazing and soil

• Social media are a powerful tool for spreading the word about soil health oriented farming

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Resources

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• A beautiful lecture by Walter Jehne, Director of Healthy Soils Australia, at Harvard University this April on the relationship between soil, carbon, and hydrological cycles is now available online

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Events

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• The Global Landscapes Forum is taking place at the end of August in Nairobi to foster political and community support to implement the AFR100 Initiative to restore 100 million hectares of degraded landscapes across Africa by 2030

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