Soils are critical to the health of our planet and essential for human, animal and plant life. they provide the nutrints and water required to grow food; they also support biodiversity and help to regulate climate, floods and droughts. However soils- and the many varied benefits they provide to humans and wildlife- are at risk from changes in climate and land use.
Soils are crucial to any plans to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions; they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 1,500 billion tonnes worldwide, which is more than in the atmosphere and vegetation combined.
Healthy soils can mitigate climate change. This could be directly, by ‘locking in’ and keeping soil carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere as CO2 or methane, or indirectly, by supporting the growth of plants, which remove CO2 from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.
Conversely, certain land management practices such as drainage for agriculture and forestry use, inefficient application of fertiliser, over-tillage and livestock grazing can exacerbate soil degradation, causing the extensive release of soil carbon and limit plant growth. This leads to negative impacts on the ecological food chain and the amount of CO2 captured from the atmosphere.
Soils themselves are also affected by changes in rainfall patterns and higher temperatures caused by climate and land use changes.
Two NERC-funded research projects, LOCKE UP and a long-term soil experimental facility in Clocaenog, North Wales, led by UKCEH, look into these in detail.
To read more about this story, check out the Planet Earth website.