SOB4ES – Europe to Africa, Inter-continental soil biota conferences
As a major component of ecosystem functioning, soil biodiversity is central to the assessment of soil health in all climatic and ecosystem types. To gain as clear a picture of belowground communities, SOB4ES is assessing multiple kingdoms of life in its search for indicators of healthy soils.
Partners and the coordinator of the SOB4ES consortium have had an amazing reception at back-to-back conferences in Cape Town, South Africa. In late August, members of the scientific communities for soil microbes gathered at the biannual 19th ISME (International Society for Microbial Ecology). The following week, soil fauna researchers met at the 19th ICSZ (International Colloquium on Soil Zoology) and 16th ICA ( International Colloquium on Apterygota), that is held every four years!
At ISME, Giles Ross (NIOO-KNAW) presented a poster titled “Identifying inter-kingdom indicators of soil health across Europe” that gave a succinct project overview focussing on the methodology and measures of bacterial and fungal diversity and activity.
The following week, at the ICSZ & ICA;
- Maria Briones (UVIGO, Project co-ordinator) presented a talk titled “Large-scale soil biodiversity monitoring across different pedoclimatic regions: Challenges and opportunities”. This detailed the problem of evaluating soil health across continental scales and how SOB4ES aims to solve it.
- Cristina Fiera (IBB, Romania) presented a poster titled “Changes in soil biota structures in different land-use types and intensities in Romania”, that showed early data based on Romanian taxa.
- Giles Ross gave a talk titled “Soil faunal indicators of soil health across land-use types, intensities and pedo-climatic zones”, that presented early findings of nematode densities across the sites.
We had great feedback and made lots of important contacts to further provide soil monitoring solutions!
