This series of lessons includes lectures and activities to demonstrate judging the condition of soil for a given area of land, the qualities of that soil, and identifying management actions to correct the condition if needed.
This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:
"Soil quality is crucial to sustaining agriculture and maintaining food security. Soil ecosystems involve complex interactions between biological communities, such as microbes, and physicochemical variables, but although living organisms can affect soil health, they are often ignored in soil management systems, running the risk that we won’t detect detrimental impacts of our actions on the soil until it is too late. A recent study shed new light on bacteria living in soil ecosystems. Researchers examined the composition of bacterial communities and physicochemical properties in 3,000 soil samples from 606 sites in New Zealand, covering indigenous forests, exotic forest plantations, horticultural areas, and pastoral grasslands. Their results showed that soil bacteria community composition was strongly tied to land use. Soil properties such as pH, nutrient concentration, and bulk density could be predicted by the bacterial communities present in the soil..."
The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.