Research

SoilRise aims to extent expertise and knowledge on soil biota in academic and public networks as a basis of utilisation of citizen science in monitoring duties below ground. Biodiversity monitoring is mostly limited by missing expertise, money and time. Belowground biota is even harder to describe, count, or characterize due to its cryptic mode of life. However, soil biota is crucial for the functioning of all terrestrial ecosystems including land use systems. Sustainable land use relays on ecosystem service provisioning of soil biota. Hence, monitoring is of great importance. SoilRise will create a system of teachers training to multiply knowledge and expertise among gardeners and farmers which will be enabled to monitor parts of soil biota to a certain level of taxonomy, activity, or functional diversity. SoilRise will start and exemplify this for earthworm communities in farmland (arable or grassland) and urban gardens and greens. Finally addressing networks of urban gardeners and farmers associations, SoilRise will develop a multiplication of expertise by implementing earthworm monitoring practises into teaching at universities and even farm schools. Students then go to their home rural communities (farmer associations) or stage citizen science events in urban gardens related to gardener networks. In the long run, well educated citizen can provide earthworm monitoring data of high value complementing biodiversity monitoring in the cultural landscape of Europe

As part of the Green Deal, agriculture faces the challenge of climate neutrality by reducing emissions and sequestering carbon in soils. Within the EU Soil Strategy ecosystem functions of healthy soils contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation should be achieved. However, currently there are hardly any realistic implementation strategies for these goals within crop production. As a new approach, the EU “Mission Soil Health” defines lighthouse farms as innovation drivers for achieving the climate and soil goals of the Green Deal. In the project SoilPioneers 2050, a national network of lighthouse farms is being set up at 60 locations, covering the most important soil and climate types as well as farming types in Austria. Modern scientific instruments are established on-farm to specifically monitor the soil functions of climate protection, nutrient efficiency, erosion protection and climate change adaptation. The potential for optimizing soil health through regenerative and agroecological practices compared to current agricultural state-of-the art systems, particularly with regard to efficient carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, is recorded through comprehensive soil indicator assessment. Based on the measured indicators, a soil quality model is developed that quantifies the management advance achieved for the individual soil functions and supports the farmers in further management optimization. A new platform will be used to process satellite data for soil organic matter balancing and assessment of crop resilience to heat/drought stress. By integrating crop-based remote sensing data into the soil quality model, the soil function assessment is improved and linked to progress made in climate change adaptation of crop production within the lighthouse farm network. Based on the improvements recorded in soil organic matter formation, nutrient and water efficiency as well as crop resilience achieved by the lighthouse farms, new simulation models will be used to develop improved estimates of climate and soil protection potentials through management innovation in arable farming within the framework of the Green Deal goals and future climate scenarios. By integrating innovative agricultural practice and research in a lighthouse farmer network, the project offers practical management solutions for the national implementation of the Green Deal goals, thereby also providing an important Europe-wide exemple for future-oriented climate action in agriculture.

Dogs, as reliable partners for humans, are increasingly used as species detection dogs in nature conservation or for searching for invasive species. Thanks to their extraordinary sense of smell, trained sniffer dogs are able to detect even the slightest traces of odor molecules such as volatile organic substances from plants. In this project, we use this ability to search for native and invasive poisonous plants with pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) in herb and spice fields. Regular consumption of PAs can be carcinogenic even in relatively small quantities and, in higher doses, can lead to irreversible liver damage. Even extremely low levels of contamination with PAs from poisonous plants can mean that herbs or spices are no longer allowed to be sold in the EU according to updated EU PA limits for those products. Despite the most careful control, contamination with PAs can occur. In addition to native PA poisonous plants such as common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris), there are also invasive species such as the eastern groundsel (S. vernalis) or the narrow-leaved ragwort (S. inaequidens), which have been introduced from Eastern Europe and Southern Africa, respectively. The changed environmental conditions caused by climate change could mean that these invasive species can increasingly establish themselves in arable crops and could thereby endanger food security. Experienced search dogs are trained to detect these poisonous plants using fresh and dried plant material at different stages of development from multiple origins. At the same time, the volatile organic compounds of these samples are also analyzed in order to be able to estimate how the content and composition of essential oils influences the detection success. In the second year of the project, searches will be carried out in different herb and spice fields in order to determine whether specially trained poisonous plant detection dogs are more efficient in searching for Senecio species than human experts and which environmental factors have the greatest influence on precision, sensitivity and efficiency. The use of detection dogs represents a particularly innovative approach to detect potential poisonous plants as early as possible in order to reduce the use of manpower and the use of weed control measures.