Soil biodiversity refers to the relationship of soil to biodiversity and to aspects of the soil that can be managed in relative to biodiversity. Soil biodiversity relates to some catchment management considerations.
According to the Australian Department of the Environment and Water Resources, biodiversity is "the variety of life: the different plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes and the ecosystems of which they are a part." Biodiversity and soil are strongly linked, because soil is the medium for a large variety of organisms, and interacts closely with the wider biosphere. Conversely, biological activity is a primary factor in the physical and chemical formation of soils.
Soil provides a vital habitat, primarily for microbes (including bacteria and fungi), but also for microfauna (such as protozoa and nematodes), mesofauna (such as microarthropods and enchytraeids), and macrofauna (such as earthworms, termites, and millipedes). The primary role of soil biota is to recycle organic matter that is derived from the "above-ground plant-based food web".
Soil is in close cooperation with the wider biosphere. The maintenance of fertile soil is "one of the most vital ecological services the living world performs", and the "mineral and organic contents of soil must be replenished constantly as plants consume soil elements and pass them up the food chain".
The correlation of soil and biodiversity can be observed spatially. For example, both natural and agricultural vegetation boundaries correspond closely to soil boundaries, even at continental and global scales.
A "subtle synchrony" is how Baskin (1997) describes the relationship that exists between the soil and the diversity of life, above and below the ground. It is not surprising that soil management has a direct effect on biodiversity. This includes practices that influence soil volume, structure, biological, and chemical characteristics, and whether soil exhibits adverse effects such as reduced fertility, soil acidification, or salinisation.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Le cours est une introduction aux Sciences du sol. Il a pour but de présenter les principales caractéristiques, propriétés et fonctions des sols. Il fait appel à des notions théoriques mais également
Soil management is the application of operations, practices, and treatments to protect soil and enhance its performance (such as soil fertility or soil mechanics). It includes soil conservation, soil amendment, and optimal soil health. In agriculture, some amount of soil management is needed both in nonorganic and organic types to prevent agricultural land from becoming poorly productive over decades. Organic farming in particular emphasizes optimal soil management, because it uses soil health as the exclusive or nearly exclusive source of its fertilization and pest control.
Intercropping is a multiple cropping practice that involves the cultivation of two or more crops simultaneously on the same field. The most common goal of intercropping is to produce a greater yield on a given piece of land by making use of resources or ecological processes that would otherwise not be utilized by a single crop. The degree of spatial and temporal overlap in the two crops can vary somewhat, but both requirements must be met for a cropping system to be an intercrop.
Soil health is a state of a soil meeting its range of ecosystem functions as appropriate to its environment. In more colloquial terms, the health of soil arises from favorable interactions of all soil components (living and non-living) that belong together, as in microbiota, plants and animals. It is possible that a soil can be healthy in terms of eco-system functioning but not necessarily serve crop production or human nutrition directly, hence the scientific debate on terms and measurements.
Soil microbial communities are vital for multiple ecosystem processes and services. In particular, soil microbial food webs are key determinants of soil biodiversity, functioning and stability. Unclear, however, is how struc-tural features of food webs, su ...
This paper shows first quantitative analysis of the detachment processes in the MAST Upgrade Super-X divertor (SXD). We identify an unprecedented impact of plasma-molecular interactions involving molecular ions (likely D2+ ), resulting in strong ion sinks ...
Hydrological extremes can affect nutrient export from catchments to streams, posing a threat to aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we investigated the effects of hydrological drought on nitrate concentrations in the streamflow of 182 German catchments from ...