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

人类正在对地球土壤施加越来越大的压力，要求它们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，保护我们的土壤很重要，这样它们才能继续提供这些重要的资源。土壤还提供许多其他有益于我们的“服务”，例如温室气体调节、养分循环以及控制我们的水的流量和质量。不幸的是，我们预测土地利用和气候变化如何影响这些服务的知识和能力是有限的。全球在不同的环境中发现了许多不同的土壤，这使得很难预测大范围内的响应。土壤，因此土壤服务是通过各种土壤有机体的活动进行的，但它们传统上很难研究，所以我们也对这种生物多样性如何为我们提供土壤和更广泛的服务知之甚少。研究土壤生物的新方法现在揭示了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行动来维持土壤和土壤功能，以及这些相互作用如何受到气候和我们管理土地的方式的影响。这个项目试图通过建立最近全球范围内关于土壤中发现的不同生物的研究和知识来解决这些问题。基本上，我们现在更多地了解在不同的土壤中发现了哪些有机体，我们现在试图检查这些知识是否有助于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，研究土地利用变化对英国不同土壤系统中土壤生物多样性、土壤特性和土壤服务的影响。然后，我们将对这些土壤进行气候变化，以检验我们是否可以根据我们在生物多样性中观察到的变化来预测土壤服务的变化。这些数据将提供关于不同土壤及其生物多样性和功能如何响应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备，为我们提供食物、纤维和健康的未来环境。首先，我们将研究土壤养分输入如何影响土壤生物群在碳循环中的活动。这一点很重要，因为土壤有机体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，也可以利用现有的有机物质来减少土壤碳储量。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巨大的未知数，并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是如何推动这些过程的。我们经常在实地研究中发现土壤群落和过程的差异，但土壤的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导致了过程速率的差异。通过控制土壤多样性但保持恒定的环境，我们可以解决这些问题，重要的是通过新的管理实践来验证增强土壤生物多样性的方法，以确保田间情况下的土壤安全。我们所有的研究都将使用计算机模拟方法进行整合，试图预测不同土壤、管理和气候情景下的土壤过程。一个主要的挑战是，看看在这些模型中纳入生物多样性参数是否有助于预测大规模景观尺度上的反应。

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.