Soil Ecology

Please note that, at this stage, this event is fully booked. Nevertheless, you are most welcome to register for this event, and accordingly, we will place you in a waiting list. Should any of the registered participants cancel his/her registration (which is quite common), we will notify you and ask you whether you would still like to participate in this event. If we do not contact you again with respect to this event, you may assume that no vacancies have arisen.

Organizers

• Prof. Wim van der Putten (Terrestrial Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology)
• Prof. Franciska de Vries (Ecosystem and Landscape Dynamics, University of Amsterdam)
• Prof. Gerlinde De Deyn (Department of Soil Quality, Wageningen University)

Date
12 - 16 June 2022
* Due to Covid these are new dates - the course was originally planned in January 2022

Rewilding soils – building novel concepts for restoring soils and their ecology
Soils are pivotal for numerous ecosystem services, including delivering food, fibre and biofuels, clean air, drinking water and carbon storage. Because of increased land use intensity, global climate change, urbanization, and other human-induced environmental changes, many soil ecosystem services are at risk because of loss of soil biodiversity. Restoring soils and soil functioning requires the restoration of physical, chemical and biological soil properties, as well as restoring ecological relationships. We may call this: ‘rewilding soils’. In this course, we will address ways to understand and promote rewilding soils, through exploring how soil ecology operates in healthy and disturbed soils, how complex networks of soil biota may be restored, and how rewilding soils might work under different (agricultural, natural, urban) environments and under a variety of (boreal-temporal-tropic) climatic conditions. We will also explore how international policy and (N)GOs that aim to restore soils operate.

Requirements for participating
Basic knowledge of soil ecology is assumed.