Team
SOILGUARD is a EU-Horizon2020 project of the ERC. Its aim is to co-create a conceptual and analytical framework that can become the global standard for future assessments of soil biodiversity status and its contribution to soil multifunctionality and human wellbeing.
All knowledge co-created will be shared through the app SOILGUARDIANS, a predictive tool based on links of causality between soil biodiversity, soil multifunctionality and wellbeing. This will support stakeholders on the transition to sustainable soil management.
The core of this project includes two large-scale soil sampling campaigns.
The first campaign is designed to assess the status of soil biodiversity and its contribution to soil multifunctionality across European and international regions. The network of sampling sites spans across three biomes (farmland, grassland and forest), and areas differing in climate, soil degradation level and soil management regime.
The second campaign aims to study the effect of climate change stressors on the soil biome and soil functioning. Climate change simulations are established in seven long-term field experiments (LTEs), comparing conventional and alternative land management. There, project partners simulated drought – with rain-out shelters – and heatwaves – with infrared panels – during two consecutive growing seasons.
In this project we lead the task on the assessment of soil biodiversity status in European and international biogeographical regions. This task will quantify the effects of sustainable soil management on soil biodiversity, it might have different efficacy depending on the biogeographical context and on the initial level of soil degradation. Special attention will be devoted to increase our understanding of correlations leading to biodiversity loss or conservation.
We also generated data on the abundance of microorganisms by performing PLFA and NLFA extractions, for all the soils sampled within the network of sites and LTEs. This allows to quantify changes in the biomass of bacteria, fungi, mychorriza and protists.
Besides this, we analyse shifts in metrics that describe the complexity of the soil biome, by constructing soil food webs – based on biomass data – and co-occurrence networks – based on community composition data (eDNA), generated by project partners for viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, nematodes, arthropods and earthworms. This will give us also information on which taxa serve as key-stone taxa in the food-web.
Link to project website: https://soilguard-h2020.eu/
Plant-soil Ecology 