A Worm's Trail: Implementing a collaborative network for the study of Historical and Recent Land Use and Soil Management in Neotropical Rainforests

'Learning from the past to inform the present and inspire the future' - Atkins Group

Despite the absence of written historical records, pre-Columbian people of the Amazon Basin developed remarkable soils referred to as Amazonian 'dark earths' (ADEs), used to promote sustainable agriculture. With increasing global demand for food, energy and carbon, it is crucial to understand and learn from past land use systems in order to appropriately manage the current and plan the future land uses. The current project will contribute to the knowledge of how soil animals and their biodiversity are related with soil fertility, ADE formation and land use changes in a mega-diverse biome. Furthermore, it will strengthen the 'ADE Network', and provide capacity building to Brazilian researchers and students interested in Amazonian biodiversity and sustainable agriculture. The results will promote better understanding of how to sustainably use and manage Amazonian soils, while simultaneously preserving their rich biodiversity.

Therefore, the proposed project will establish a collaborative network composed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of researchers in different areas of Brazil (and the world), therefore solidifying the connection between the UK and Brazil, in particular between Cardiff University and Embrapa Forestry.

The proposed project will establish a collaborative network composed by a wide number of researchers from different scientific backgrounds and therefore solidifying the connection between the United Kingdom and Brazil, in particular the collaborative status of Cardiff University. The originality and innovative highlights to retain are the following:

i) by conducting high quality interdisciplinary research on soil biodiversity and ecology of Amazon Dark Earths and by connecting it to past land use legacies will help determine to which extent it is possible to recreate some properties of such highly fertile soils in today's agricultural settings;

ii) the research will enable the proposal of a new model for ADEs genesis;

iii) it will establish a collaborative framework virtually connected by an online interface, making the resources available to the community and general public;

iv) it will describe the soil biodiversity associated with human presence in the Amazon in areas that are currently unknown;

v) at same time, it will transfer genomics and computational tools developed by the applicant to the partner hosting during the outgoing phase (using small group workshops and seminars), and finally

vi) the genomic resources raised and expertise in applying environmental genomics into the context of a tropical rainforest has the potential to provide tools to assist projects globally that are attempting to understand soil ecology in tropic zones under threat from growing agricultural demands.

In addition the potential of genomics as a tool to provide insight into ancient ecologies and agriculture approaches is now gathering significant scientific traction providing significant future opportunities. More directly, as the developed world is placing developing economies under increasing demands to deliver inexpensive food at the cost of some of the world's centres of biodiversity, the current project looks to the past to find more sustainable approaches to intensification for the future.

Three specific on-line strategies will be used to communicate with the public about the project each coordinated through a central web-site, a static 6th month e-newsletter, dynamic blog revealing the progression of the expeditions and events, such blog will be connected interactively with other social media outreach channels (such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+). The infrastructure to support this stratified outreach approach is already in use by Prof. Kille to support the Environmental 'Omics Synthesis Community and his personal research team and it will be customised appropriately to support this project. The project will exploit the Cardiff University external relations division to promote the project activities looking to engage directly with national and international media as the team has previously in other projects. When in Cardiff the Fellow will present at the annual Marie Curie evenings and contribute to the on-going science café series which will both be aimed at direct public engagement.

It will be essential to support dissemination of the results to discrete sectors, the ADEs associated research community and eventually the wider scientific society. The former community will require dynamic interactive access, which will be achieved using CU's Confluence Wiki to create an Open Data Management Framework compliant with Horizon 2020. Cardiff University will also use its established relationship with Radio Wales to promote the research through its 'week in science' show.