U-GRASS: Understanding and enhancing soil ecosystem services and resilience in UK grass and croplands

U-GRASS：了解和增强英国草地和农田的土壤生态系统服务和恢复力

• 批准号: NE/M016757/1
• 负责人: Nicholas Ostle
• 金额: $ 36.48万
• 依托单位: Lancaster University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2015 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FM016757%2F1
• 关键词: GRASS; Understanding; enhancing; soil; ecosystem

Humans are exerting increasing pressure on the Earth's soils to produce food crops and provide us with other natural resources. With growing populations and possible climate change it is important that we protect our soils so that they can continue to deliver these essential resources. Soils also provide many other "services" which benefit us; such as greenhouse gas regulation, nutrient cycling, and controlling the flows and quality of our waters. Unfortunately our knowledge and ability to predict how these services are affected with changes in land use and climate is limited. Many different soils are found globally in different environments, making it hard to predict responses over large scales. Soil, and therefore soil services is made through the activities of a wide variety of soil organisms, but they are traditionally hard to study and so we also know little about how this biological diversity acts to provide us with soil and wider services. New ways to study soil organisms are now revealing more information on the types of organisms which live in different soils around globally, and a key challenge is to learn how these organisms act to sustain soils and soil functions, and how these interactions are affected by climate and the way we manage our land.This project seeks to address these issues by building on recent global-scale research and knowledge regarding the different organisms found in soil. Essentially we now know more about which organisms are found in different soils, and we now seek to examine whether this knowledge can help explain the different responses of our soils to land use and climate change. We will do this firstly using a survey approach, examining the effects of land use change on soil biodiversity, soil properties, and soil services in different soil systems around the UK. We will then take these soils and subject them to climate change to examine whether we can predict the changes in soil services based on the changes we observe in biodiversity. These data will provide fundamental knowledge on how different soils and their biodiversity and functions respond to change in land use and climate. A second aim of our research is to examine the specific ways in which soil biodiversity regulates soil and its services. This "mechanistic" understanding could provide us with new ways to manage the land to deliver more sustainable soil stocks, giving us food, fibre and a healthy environment well into the future. Firstly we will examine how soil nutrient inputs affect the soil biota's activities in cycling carbon. This is important as soil organisms are primarily fed by nutrients from plants, but they can also respire carbon back to the atmosphere as CO2, and can also feed off existing organic matter decreasing soil carbon stocks. How soil biodiversity, land use and climate affect the balance of these processes is a large unknown in soil research and can have important consequences for our ability to predict future response of soils to change. We also seek to examine how the biodiversity itself drives these processes. Often in field studies we find differences in soil communities and processes, but the soil physical and chemical conditions also differ, so we can't determine if it is the environment or the biodiversity that is responsible for the difference in process rates. By manipulating soil diversity but maintaining a constant environment we can address these issues, and importantly validate approaches for enhancing soil biodiversity with new management practices to deliver soil security in field scenarios. All of our research will be integrated using computer modelling approaches which will attempt to predict soil processes under different soil, management, and climatic scenarios. A major challenge is to see whether the incorporation of biodiversity parameters in these models will help predict responses over large landscape scales.

人类对地球土壤施加越来越大的压力，以生产粮食作物并为我们提供其他自然资源。随着人口的增长和可能的气候变化，我们必须保护我们的土壤，以便它们能够继续提供这些重要资源。土壤还提供许多其他使我们受益的“服务”；例如温室气体调节、养分循环以及控制水域的流量和质量。不幸的是，我们预测这些服务如何受到土地利用和气候变化影响的知识和能力是有限的。全球不同环境中存在许多不同的土壤，因此很难预测大范围的反应。土壤以及土壤服务是通过多种土壤生物的活动形成的，但传统上很难研究它们，因此我们对这种生物多样性如何为我们提供土壤和更广泛的服务也知之甚少。研究土壤生物的新方法现在正在揭示更多关于生活在全球不同土壤中的生物类型的信息，一个关键的挑战是了解这些生物如何维持土壤和土壤功能，以及这些相互作用如何受到气候的影响以及我们管理土地的方式。该项目旨在通过最近关于土壤中发现的不同生物体的全球范围研究和知识来解决这些问题。本质上，我们现在更多地了解了不同土壤中存在哪些生物体，并且我们现在试图研究这些知识是否可以帮助解释我们的土壤对土地利用和气候变化的不同反应。我们将首先使用调查方法来研究土地利用变化对英国各地不同土壤系统的土壤生物多样性、土壤特性和土壤服务的影响。然后，我们将把这些土壤置于气候变化的环境中，以检验我们是否可以根据观察到的生物多样性变化来预测土壤服务的变化。这些数据将提供有关不同土壤及其生物多样性和功能如何应对土地利用和气候变化的基础知识。我们研究的第二个目标是研究土壤生物多样性调节土壤及其服务的具体方式。这种“机械”的理解可以为我们提供管理土地的新方法，以提供更可持续的土壤储量，为我们在未来提供食物、纤维和健康的环境。首先，我们将研究土壤养分输入如何影响土壤生物群的碳循环活动。这很重要，因为土壤生物主要以植物的养分为食，但它们也可以将碳以二氧化碳的形式呼吸回大气中，并且还可以以现有的有机物为食，从而减少土壤碳储量。土壤生物多样性、土地利用和气候如何影响这些过程的平衡在土壤研究中是一个很大的未知数，并且可能对我们预测土壤未来对变化的反应的能力产生重要影响。我们还试图研究生物多样性本身如何驱动这些过程。在实地研究中，我们经常发现土壤群落和过程存在差异，但土壤物理和化学条件也不同，因此我们无法确定是环境还是生物多样性造成了过程速率的差异。通过操纵土壤多样性但保持环境恒定，我们可以解决这些问题，并且重要的是验证通过新的管理实践增强土壤生物多样性的方法，以在实地场景中提供土壤安全。我们所有的研究都将使用计算机建模方法进行整合，该方法将尝试预测不同土壤、管理和气候情景下的土壤过程。一个主要的挑战是看看将生物多样性参数纳入这些模型是否有助于预测大景观尺度的响应。

项目成果

Soil bacterial networks are less stable under drought than fungal networks.

• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05516-7
• 发表时间: 2018-08-02
• 期刊: Nature communications
• 影响因子: 16.6
• 作者: de Vries FT;Griffiths RI;Bailey M;Craig H;Girlanda M;Gweon HS;Hallin S;Kaisermann A;Keith AM;Kretzschmar M;Lemanceau P;Lumini E;Mason KE;Oliver A;Ostle N;Prosser JI;Thion C;Thomson B;Bardgett RD
• 通讯作者: Bardgett RD

Soil multifunctionality and drought resistance are determined by plant structural traits in restoring grassland.

• DOI: 10.1002/ecy.2437
• 发表时间: 2018-10
• 期刊: Ecology
• 影响因子: 4.8
• 作者: Fry EL;Savage J;Hall AL;Oakley S;Pritchard WJ;Ostle NJ;Pywell RF;Bullock JM;Bardgett RD
• 通讯作者: Bardgett RD

Legumes increase grassland productivity with no effect on nitrous oxide emissions

• DOI: 10.1007/s11104-019-04338-w
• 发表时间: 2020-01-01
• 期刊: PLANT AND SOIL
• 影响因子: 4.9
• 作者: Barneze, Arlete S.;Whitaker, Jeanette;Ostle, Nicholas J.
• 通讯作者: Ostle, Nicholas J.

Sticky dead microbes: Rapid abiotic retention of microbial necromass in soil

• DOI: 10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.107929
• 发表时间: 2020-10-01
• 期刊: SOIL BIOLOGY & BIOCHEMISTRY
• 影响因子: 9.7
• 作者: Buckeridge, Kate M.;La Rosa, Alfio Fabio;Ostle, Nick J.
• 通讯作者: Ostle, Nick J.

Does agri-environmental management enhance biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services?: A farm-scale experiment

• DOI: 10.1016/j.agee.2021.107582
• 发表时间: 2021-07-23
• 期刊: AGRICULTURE ECOSYSTEMS & ENVIRONMENT
• 影响因子: 6.6
• 作者: Bullock, James M.;McCracken, Morag E.;Pywell, Richard F.
• 通讯作者: Pywell, Richard F.