Tuesday 23rd October, Room E419, 4th floor, John Dalton East Building, from 1.00-2.00pm
If you would like meet with the speaker before the seminar, please contact this week’s host, Robin Sen.
New Views of the Underworld: Visualising the Structure and Functioning of Soil Communities
Professor Karl Ritz, Cranfield University
Soils have played significant roles in the development of the Earth system, life has evolved in the context of soil systems and civilisations have risen and fallen by virtue of their exploitation and management of the earth they have inhabited. Soils continue to support the needs of contemporary societies, and this requirement will unquestionably prevail. Soils are remarkable materials, constituted of an extraordinarily diverse range of mineral and organic components, a tiny fraction of which are alive, but organised and interactive in particular ways that result in the delivery of the range of ecosystem services upon which sustained functioning of our planet depends. But to most people, soils are ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and indeed even many environmental scientists have a limited appreciation of the fundamental nature of soil systems. Soils are demanding to study because they are opaque to visible light, very heterogeneous, and often disintegrate when they are disturbed, yet function by virtue of their spatial organisation. Furthermore, biodiversity belowground exceeds that aboveground by many orders of magnitude, with tens of thousands of microbial species present in almost any handful of fertile soil. Such opacity and complexity challenges our ability to observe and analyse how soil systems are organised, and how such arrangements relate to function.
This seminar will review some contemporary approaches to visualise the spatial and biological constitution of soils, and how such techniques can provide insights into some of the most basic mechanisms by which soils function.
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