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

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.

Beneficiaries and level of engagement:
1. Farmers and the wider agricultural sector. The agricultural sector faces the challenge of how to increase agricultural production to enhance food security while at the same time reducing environmental impacts. A primary goal of this project is to understand how land management in different environmental contexts affects potential trade-offs between multiple soil services; and also assess the degree to which management intervention in can modify trade-offs. All project partners we have good contacts with these stakeholders and throughout the project we will engage landowners and practitioners particularly in the field sampling in WP1. An information leaflet will be made to disseminate the aims of the project.
2. Retailers and agri-enterprises. e.g. Cotswold seeds. New commercial enterprises are developing products aimed at enhancing above ground services but their effects on soil sustainability are unknown. Various agri-food industry bodies will be involved as stakeholders though partner contacts, evidenced by formal project support of Syngenta, but we will also build on existing links existing links with Unilever, Tesco, Waitrose and PepsiCo.
3. The water industry and other businesses with interests in environmental sustainability. Eutrophication is a major issue in the UK, and flood prevention is an emerging challenge particularly in the UK, particularly in the large populated areas amongst agriculturally productive lands. Efforts to increase soil organic matter in such landscapes could prevent run off.
3. Environmental NGOs. Conservation practices leading to better service delivery above ground have unexplored consequences on biodiversity and soil services below ground.
4. Government agencies and policy-makers related to agriculture and ecosystem services (e.g. Natural England, Environment Agency, Environment Agency, Defra,). We have formal support from Government agencies, including Natural England, who will be involved from the outset of the project in our project committee to ensure that the project delivers results that can be integrated well into farm advice, agri-environment schemes, SSSI management. The role of PS as Science Director of ClimateXChange will ensure that project findings are disseminated in Scotland.
5. Academics and other research communities e.g. international and national programs such as the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative and Earth Microbiome Project; academic societies, the wider NERC Soil Security Programme, Other NERC -BBSRC research programmes such as NERC -BESS and Macronutrient Cycles programmes, and BBSRC SFS-SARISSA (Rothamsted partners). Additionally we will disseminate project information and findings to UK Scientific initiatives such as the UK Soil Observatory (http://www.ukso.org/) Specific academic beneficiaries are listed in the appropriate section on the JE-S form, and they will be informed of outputs in the form of a website, publications (open source where possible) and conference attendance. A project website, twitter feeds and press releases will be used to inform all beneficiaries (including the public) on the outputs from the project. The website will include short video recordings including explanations of our work, results and future applications. Key presentations and electronic outputs from workshops will be uploaded to slideshare and embededed on the project site. The CEH communications team will help to identify soil-related forward feature articles relating to these soil issues in relevant science and trade press (e.g NERC's Planet Earth, Farmers Weekly, and agricultural Journals such as John Deere's "The Furrow").