Assessing Forest Soil Condition and Health
Advancing forest soil health and biodiversity assessment through national monitoring, machine learning, and novel methodologies
Overview
Forest soils are fundamental to carbon storage, nutrient cycling, water regulation, and biodiversity but vary widely in their response to management and environmental change.
These projects aim to:
- provide a national assessment of forest soil condition, integrating chemical, physical and biological indicators to inform soil health, ecosystem services, sustainable forest management and environmental policy
- overcome common challenges in the study of soil biodiversity in terms of taxonomy and sampling replication, with the development of a machine learning-based ‘MESOSCAN’ dataset and tool, for soil biodiversity identification (mesofauna)
- investigate applicability of a novel remote ecoacoustic-based methodology for forest soil biodiversity monitoring
Funders
Funded by the UK Government through Defra’s Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme (NCEA).
