Campus Centre of
Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use

SoilRise - New European Biodiversa+ joint project for monitoring soil organisms starts at the Campus-Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use (CBL)

Six institutions from five countries are developing and testing new approaches in citizen science to expand and optimise the monitoring of soil organisms.

Due to their mostly hidden and cryptic way of life, soil organisms receive comparatively little attention in science and are hardly recognised by the general public. Now that it has been recognised how important environmental and biodiversity monitoring is in order to obtain reliable and comparable data and thus derive facts and options for action for social decision-makers. For earthworms as a prominent group of soil organisms, SoilRise will on the one hand increase the amount of data observed with the help of citizen science and on the other hand improve data quality through tutor-based support for citizen scientists. At the same time, DNA barcoding will be used to check and thus further optimise identification keys and species identifications. We expect significant progress in taxonomic uncertainties in a European comparison. Different forms of land use in rural and urban environments are being analysed.



SoilRise was initiated and is coordinated at the CBL in Göttingen (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/cbl). The Forest Genetics working group (Oliver Gailing) is involved and plays a key role in barcoding activities. Scientific institutions from France (University of Rennes 1, Living Lab Clef), Ireland (University College Dublin), Poland (University of Agriculture in Krakow) and Austria (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences) are also involved.

SoilRise is funded with 1.2 million € from the European Partnership Biodiversa+.

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