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Webinar thumbnail of speakers names and an earthworm

Dr Jackie Stroud (Warwick Crop Centre, School of Life Sciences) and colleagues from Baker Consultants talk about their recent work 'listening for earthworms'.

In Europe, earthworms are often perceived as an indicator of soil health. Soil management, particularly tillage intensity and organic matter management can change earthworm community structures. However, measurement of earthworms is uncommon and infrequent – time-consuming digging, handsorting and laboratory identification is difficult to do at field and farm scales. This is a major barrier in using soil health measurements to guide soil management practices. To resolve this problem, Dr Jaqueline Stroud is developing soil acoustics as a soil health measurement with bioacoustics experts (Carlos Abrahams, Baker Consultants). In this session, they share some of the interesting noises which come from soils and their initial findings. Unfortunately, at times, the audio clips played during the webinar were not loud enough to hear. However, hopefully the sounds graphs and Jackie's descriptions when playing the sounds should provide an idea of what was being played.

 

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Earthworms are known as ecosystem engineers due to their ability to structurally, chemically and biologically transform the soil environment in which they live.

Soil biology includes a variety of soil microbes, bacteria and larger fauna such as earthworms and collembolans.

Warwick Crop Centre is a national centre of excellence for research on fresh produce. We provide post-graduate training and specialise in research projects promoting sustainable agriculture, horticulture and food security.