Long-term measurements of weather, floods, water quality, human health, wildlife populations, earthquakes, and air pollution are highly valued. Regrettably, there are no analogous networks of observations of the earth's soil. The Earth's soil is today changing rapidly, driven largely by human impact, and remarkably little is understood about its rate and processes of change. A network of soil observation sites could inform scientists and the public alike, not only about soil, but also about how soil affects the quality of the atmosphere, water resources, and ecosystems themselves. The intent of this project is to establish an RCN among scientists, students, and teachers, who have experience with the two main scientific approaches to estimating soil change: long-term soil experiments (LTSEs) and chronosequence studies.
The intellectual goal is to synthesize and critically evaluate the science of soil change, and to promote new research across sites currently used for LTSEs and chronosequence studies.
The goal for broader impact is to stimulate scientific community development (both in terms of scientific discipline and in diversity of individuals), as well as much greater interest in the study and appreciation for the changing soil of planet Earth.
To accomplish these goals, two active projects will be combined which for several years have been operating in parallel: the Long-Term Soil Experiment Networking Project and the Weathering Systems Sciences Consortium (WSSC). This proposed RCN will be called the Global Soil Change Community, and it will build upon much of the work of LTSE Project and WSSC by promoting greater use of long-term soil experiments and chronosequence studies throughout the world.
These goals will be accomplished with annual workshops and papers, but especially through a competitive program for undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs, as well as for teachers. Drupal.org, a website content management system (CMS), will help us unite all these groups and others (including the general public and under-represented groups as well) with a community website that is remarkably open to all. By the end of the project, a CMS should include not only website-driven inventories of LTSEs and chronosequence studies but data bases of soil property and process data that can be used to run models.
These collaborations will significantly advance the interaction among soil-change research sites and significantly enhance understanding of the rate and processes of soil biogeochemical change.
Imagine the science of the Earth’s climate, if weather stations were uncoordinated and weather station information was not networked or compared. Such is the present state of the world’s soil observatories that seek to understand how soils are changing over years, decades, and centuries, especially in response to land management. In 2004, a graduate class at Duke University began to inventory the world’s long-term field experiments that test how land management changes soil fertility, biogeochemistry, and ecology over years, decades, and even centuries. They created a website, ambitiously called their project the International Network of Long-Term Soil Experiments (LTSEs), and became excited because many of these studies provide the main body of knowledge on soil sustainability. In 2006, the professor of the class, Daniel Richter, launched a website (http://nicholas.ltse.duke.edu) with the help of a colleague and support from research programs at NSF, USDA, and the Trent Foundation and expanded the inventory into a network of nearly 250 LTSEs. This project has resulted in numerous scientific papers, presentations at scientific meetings, and workshops organized that mainly target young scientists, encouraging them to make use of the invaluable LTSE studies. Based on the 250 LTSEs in the network, about two-thirds are in Europe and North America, and most test soils that support agricultural crops. Remarkably few LTSEs test soils that are low in native fertility, support forests or wetlands, are in urban, residential, or industrial use, or are in the tropics or boreal zones. While new LTSEs can be proposed for these latter soils and ecosystems, Prof. Richter and his colleagues are beginning to sample soils from 30 to 40 LTSEs to test the cumulative effects of long-term nitrogen fertilization and organic matter amendments on soil chemistry and biology. They expect their studies will contribute to a significant new understanding of soil and ecosystem sustainabilty.
