Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Food, fiber, and biofuel production is one of the core ecosystem services provided by soils. However, soils also contribute to water purification, carbon sequestration, habitat for biodiversity, and nutrient cycling. Intensification of agriculture is being promoted as essential to increase food production for a growing global population. However, intensification has also been linked to widely publicized environmental issues surrounding water quality and quantity, greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced biodiversity. Among the most significant problems with intensification is reduced resiliency to change. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient information to characterize the resiliency of key soil ecosystem services to change, particularly in Canadian agro-ecosystems. This lack of information presents a major obstacle to sustainable agriculture: How might soils respond to either a change in land use due to intensification, or to a change in temperature and precipitation patterns under global climate change? In particular, what might the net change in soil function be across the agricultural landscape?To quantify soil's resilience in agro-ecosystems, we first need to quantify the baseline ecosystem services that soils provide under different land uses in different landscape positions. What services can be readily quantified? Which ones differ under different land uses? Which ones do not? By linking sensitive measurements of soil properties and function to land use and landform, can we determine which indices are most vulnerable (least resilient) to land use change under future change? Ultimately, can we identify a short-term soil test for long-term resilience? In turn, can we determine the benefits and costs of soil ecosystem services to quantify resilience and sustainability of agricultural landscapes?In this project, we will look at a suite of novel indices of soil change across ecotonal and land use gradients to answer these questions. Furthermore, by looking at these indices across topographic gradient, we will determine how different positions in these hummocky landscapes might respond to change.