During Soil Animal Days – which are from September 25 to October 7 – attention is paid to the insects that can be found in the soil. Scientists are calling on people to do their own research into the animals and the results online. This makes it possible to map out how things are going.
“You can visit anywhere: in your garden, on your balcony, in the park or on the schoolyard, for example”, biologist and ecologist Froukje Rienks of the Netherlands Institute for Ecology told EditieNL.
Issues
The soil has not been going well for some time, says Rienks. Heavy agricultural machinery compresses agricultural land, so that water cannot flow away and benthic animals cannot move. Backyards are more often filled with stones, so that greenery disappears.
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This is at the expense of the animals underground. “Without soil life there is no food. There can also be flooding if the soil does not carry the water through properly. Autumn leaves remain and there is no nutrition for the plants next year.”
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Climate change
Arjan Koomen, Sustainable Land Use program leader at Wageningen University, believes that more attention should be paid to the pursuit of a healthy soil. “If you look at the current concerns about the soil and the role it plays in the fight against climate change, you can see that too little attention is paid to it.”
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According to the scientist, the soil can store greenhouse gases such as CO2 and N2O, thereby removing these harmful gases from the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, Koomen warns that we must also be careful with this. “The soil has stored a lot of carbon. It can be released at the right temperature.” He also emphasizes that the soil alone cannot solve the climate problem and that we should therefore not focus on it.
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