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SOILutions

Topic outline

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    General

  • Overview

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    Welcome to SOILutions

    The SOILutions project aims at making soil health education accessible to a wider audience, in addition to students and researchers of soil and environmental sciences. In this project, experiments on various soil related challenges and solutions will be conducted. These include soil salinity, microplastics pollution and other soil health improvement strategies. The experiments are accessible in open domain through the HOOU platform in the form of text and video content. The insights gained in this project can form the basis for research projects for researchers and project work and theses for students. The documentation from the project can also serve as a laboratory guideline for laboratory-based modules. This project and its output will be integrated into the modules ‘Water and Environment: Theory and Application’ and ‘Emerging Trends in Environmental Engineering’ offered by the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology TUHH.

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    • Navigation

      Explore the SOILutions project and find out more about this!

      SOIlutions Einstiegsgrafik SOIlutions Experiment1 Experiment2 Experiment3 Overview Quiz



    • Introduction


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  • 1. Soil salinity and plant growth

    In this experiment, the effect of soil salinity on plant growth will be demonstrated to the students and the online audience of the HOOU project SOILutions through the research-based learning approach. Soil salinity is a major worldwide problem affecting 20% of the global agricultural land, and this number is expected to rise to 50% by the year 2050, under the business as usual scenario. Soil being the natural resource necessary for the production of 99% of human food, soil salinity is an existential threat to humanity. In order to address this issue, a proper understanding and a wider acknowledgement of the problem is necessary, which is the aim of this project. Two plant species—common garden cress and common bush beans—will be under focus in this experiment. While as beans were selected by virtue of it being a source of nutrition worldwide, garden cress was selected for its fast growth dynamics, which makes a comparison easier.

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      Experiment 1: The effect of soil salinity on plant growth

      Garden kress

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      Materials needed:

      Soil, common salt, cress seeds, beans seeds, planting pots (an egg tray or a yogurt can work as good), ruler, and kitchen balance

      Procedure:

      The two plant species will be grown in planting pots under saline and non-saline soil conditions. The procedure can be undertaken in the following steps:

      1. Select the number of pots you want to use and divide them into two batches—for saline and non-saline treatments. Mark the pots accordingly as per your convenience.
      2. Fill the pots with the appropriate amount of soil so as to keep some space to water the soil and mix it.
      3. Put pure tap water into the pots marked for non-saline treatment and tap water mixed with common salt (1 to 5 g per liter) into the pots marked for saline treatments.
      4. Mix the soil well in order to distribute the moisture and salt uniformly and sow the seeds into the soil. Use a little bit of soil to cover the seeds and the pots.
      5. Place the pots at a warm location that gets a few hours of sun every day and is easily accessible for watering the pots.
      6. Monitor the growth of garden cress for one week and beans for four weeks to observe the effect of salinity on the plant growth. Monitor the growth of the plants and document it in the form of photographs and length measurements.
      7. You can share the results with us on the email address given below for publication in the final report.
      8. At the end of the monitoring period, harvest the plants and do a mass measurement of the plant biomass (you can also let the healthy plants to grow on).

      The results of the experiments and the knowledge gained in this project will be put together in the form of E-Learning videos published on the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) E-Learning platform.

      Click here to download the pdf version of this handout.

      Slideshow

      Outlook

      In the next experiment, we will have a look at one of the possible solutions to mitigate this soil health challenge and hence reduce the effects of soil salinity on plant growth.

  • 2. Mitigation of salinity effects on plant growth

    In this experiment, the use of organic compost as a mitigation strategy in saline soils is demonstrated. As demonstrated in the previous experiment, soil salinity has a negative effect on plant growth. In the practical scenario, this means soil salinity affects food security and other ecosystem services provided by soil and plants. There are different reasons soil salinity has been attributed to, which include the excessive use of agrochemicals and in some cases the use of saline water for irrigation. However, with respect to ameliorating soil salinity and mitigating its effects on plant growth, research is ongoing. Many options have been explored, which include phytoremediation of soils using different plants or the use of organic additives to the soil. This experiment is aimed at inculcating an understanding of one of the potential solutions to this problem. In this regard, we demonstrate the use of organic compost as a means to overcome the effects of soil salinity on plant growth. As in the previous experiment, wo plant species—common garden cress and common bush beans—will be under focus in this experiment.

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      Experiment 2: Mitigation of salinity effects on plant growth

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      Materials needed:

      Soil, common salt, compost, cress seeds, beans seeds, planting pots (an egg tray or a yogurt can work as good), ruler, and kitchen balance

      Procedure:

      The two plant species will be grown in planting pots under saline and non-saline soil conditions, with and without compost. The procedure can be undertaken in the following steps:

      1. Select the number of pots you want to use and mark them for the different treatments. Mark the pots accordingly as per your convenience.
      2. Mix compost and soil with three different composition levels (0% compost, 25% compost; 50% compost).
      3. Fill the pots with the appropriate amount of soil or soil-compost mixture so as to keep some space to water the soil and mix it.
      4. Put tap water into the pots marked for non-saline treatment and tap water mixed with common salt (5 g per liter) into the pots marked for saline treatment.
      5. Mix the soil well in order to distribute the moisture and salt uniformly and sow the seeds into the soil. Use a little bit of soil to cover the seeds.
      6. Place the pots at a warm location that gets a few hours of sun every day and is easily accessible for watering.
      7. Monitor the growth of garden cress for one week and beans for four weeks to observe the effect of salinity on the plant growth. Monitor the growth of the plants and document it in the form of photographs.
      8. At the end of the monitoring period, harvest the plants and do a mass measurement of the plant biomass (you can also let the healthy plants to grow on).

      The results of the experiments and the knowledge gained in this project will be put together in the form of E-Learning videos published on the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) E-Learning platform.

      Click here to download the pdf version of this handout.

      Slideshow

      Outlook

      In the next experiment, we will look at another emerging soil health challenge experienced around the world.

  • 3. Microplastics in soil-plant environment

    In this experiment, the effect of microplastics on plant growth is demonstrated. In the previous experiments, we demonstrated the negative effect of soil salinity on plant growth. This experiment deals with another emerging soil challenge, which is contamination with microplastics. The presence of microplastics in marine and aquatic environments has been widely studied but the effect of microplastics in soil environment and its effect on plant growth is an emerging field of study. In this experiment, the effect of different microplastic concentrations was examined, in presence of different salt concentrations. Common bush beans were used as the plant specimen in this experiment and the experiment was conducted with two different microplastic concentrations.

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      Experiment 3: Microplastics in soil-plant environment

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      Materials needed:

      Soil, common salt, sample microplastics, beans seeds, planting pots, ruler, and kitchen balance

      Procedure:

      The beans will be grown in planting pots under saline and non-saline soil conditions, with and without microplastics. The procedure can be undertaken in the following steps:

      1. Select the number of pots you want to use and mark them for the different treatments. Mark the pots accordingly as per your convenience.
      2. Mix soil, salt, and microplastics with the different composition levels (2.5% microplastics and 5% microplastics, and two different salinity levels S1 and S2).
      3. Fill the pots with the appropriate amount of soil or soil-microplastics mixture so as to keep some space to water the soil and mix it.
      4. Put tap water into the pots marked for non-saline treatment and tap water mixed with common salt (S1: 2 g per liter and S2: 4 g per liter) into the pots marked for saline treatment.
      5. Mix the soil well in order to distribute the moisture and salt uniformly and sow the seeds into the soil. Use a little bit of soil to cover the seeds.
      6. Place the pots at a warm location that gets a few hours of sun every day and is easily accessible for watering.
      7. Monitor the growth of beans for four weeks to observe the effect of salinity on the plant growth. Monitor the growth of the plants and document it in the form of photographs.
      8. At the end of the monitoring period, harvest the plants and do a mass measurement of the plant biomass (you can also let the healthy plants to grow on).

      The results of the experiments and the knowledge gained in this project will be put together in the form of E-Learning videos published on the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) E-Learning platform.

      Click here to download the pdf version of this handout.


      Slideshow

      Outlook

      It can be concluded from these three experiments that soil health challenges like salinity and microplastics contamination affects plant growth and hence our food security. Furthermore, it appears that different factors affecting soil health could have cumulative effects on different ecosystem services. Therefore, on one hand, there is a need for more detailed studies in this field and on the other hand immediate measures need to be taken to limit the flow of plastics and salinity causing agents into the soil in order to sustain different soil-related ecosystem services. Furthermore, our simple experiments highlight the need for widespread soil health education which is more urgent than ever. You can conclude this E-Learning course by testing your knowledge with this quiz and you can read more about these topics from the reading list we have prepared for you here.

  • Quiz and further reading

    You can conclude this E-Learning course by testing your knowledge with a quiz and you can read more about these topics from the reading list we have prepared for you.

  • Wrap-Up

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      Concratulations!

      You have arrived at the end of the learning offer and thus end your journey in this topic.

      Great that you made it this far! I hope you were able to take a lot of exciting new information with you from this learning opportunity, broaden your horizons and learn something new.

      At the same time, of course, I also hope that you had fun dealing with the content.


    • That`s what you learned


      You learned about the importance of healthy soils for global food securit.


      You learned to identify soil salinity and microplastic contamination as soil health challenges.


      You learned to gain practical insights into the use of compost for improving soil health.


      You learned to develop an overview of the different aspects of soil health for possible future research.