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by Juan Vicente Beneitez Lajas on 22/Oct/20
A new project in fields4ever
University of Santiago de Compostela, will take action to recover the soil health through the project Soil health in urban agriculture.
Project explanation
Samples required and project description
This project is comprised of 54 soil samples, which have been granted as part of the fields4ever Initiative.
Description
This project aims to analyze urban soils with BeCrop Technology to get information about soil health and complement it with chemical and physical data for providing a broader picture of soil quality. This is essential because, despite the increase of urban agriculture during the last decades, these soils are less studied than agricultural soils in farmland areas.
Methodology
BeCrop technology will be applied to soils from 10 different urban garden areas, in order to obtain information about the microbial communities of the different types of soil involved.
Goals
- To achieve a comprehensive view of soil health in urban agriculture.
- Obtain information on soil microbiome in urban agriculture.
- Understand the potential effects of pollution and other degradation processes in urban soil health.
Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry
The University of Santiago de Compostela is a public institution of higher education and research based in Santiago de Compostela and Lugo (Spain). The Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry has different areas of research including soil degradation and remediation, soil fertility, sustainable land management or soil quality assessment.
Heads of the project
Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry
Remigio Paradelo is a researcher of the Ramón y Cajal fellowship program. His research activity focuses on the influence and impacts of human activities on soils, as well as on the development of techniques for remediation of the negative impacts.
Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry
María Teresa Barral Silva is a teacher and researcher in the Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry. Her activity focuses on environmental quality, with special emphasis on the evaluation and preservation of soil health.
Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry
Cecilia Herbón is a PhD student in the Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, working on urban soils.
Testimonial
“The BeCrop analyses is an important complement to our study on the quality of urban agriculture soils, providing information on biological health that we could not obtain otherwise.”