Bloomington, Indiana – There is a busy, hidden world under every field and pasture. Scientists think that more than half of the world’s biodiversity lives underground, in the soil itself. But the living creatures that make this hidden ecosystem work don’t often come up when people talk about how to quantify soil health.
André Franco, an assistant professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, is trying to change that. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has given Franco a grant of more than $737,000 to make soil biodiversity a standard part of soil health examinations.
These days, soil report cards tend to focus on chemistry, such as nutrients, minerals, and other things that can be measured. They often forget to mention the little creatures that help soil work, like nematodes, mites, springtails, earthworms, and many other invertebrates.
Credit: Unsplash
Read also: Mayor Kerry Thomson says Bloomington must confront long standing housing shortage
These creatures break down organic materials, recycle nutrients, help keep pests and diseases in check, and sculpt the soil that crops need to grow. Because their communities can change quickly based on farming techniques, they may give early and useful signs of how well the soil is doing.
But we still have a lot to understand about how these subsurface populations react to different management practices and whether regeneration methods really make the soil stronger over time. According to Franco, reducing that gap is important not just for farming, but also for bigger public purposes like protecting waterways, controlling erosion, preserving biodiversity, and storing carbon.
Read also: Grant funding supports long term plan to remove and replace dying ash trees in Bloomington
The project, called “Integrating soil animals into the soil health framework to foster multifunctionality in regenerative agroecosystems,” is a collaboration between Franco and Christine Sprunger from Michigan State University. Their team will do study in Long-Term Agroecosystem study field sites in North Dakota, Nebraska, Michigan, and Ohio, which are all in the Midwest. They want to learn how different farming practices affect soil life by comparing crop and rangeland systems in the real world.
Researchers will conduct controlled experiments that modify soil animal populations to directly assess the effects of these alterations on soil performance, in addition to fieldwork. The goal of the combined approach is to provide useful indicators that can be added to current frameworks for soil health.
Franco noted that the main purpose is to give farmers and other people who work in agriculture better tools to help them with sustainable intensification.
“Our goal is to provide agriculture professionals with more complete tools to guide investments in sustainable intensification,” Franco said.
“By including soil animals in the conversation, the research will help ensure that farms remain productive while providing public benefits such as cleaner water and stronger regional economies.”
