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GRACEnet Soil Biology Group
Steering Committee: Veronica Acosta-Martinez (Lubbock, TX; Chair), Dan Manter (Fort Collins, CO; Data POC), Jude Maul (Beltsville, MD; Data POC), Mike Lehman (Brookings, SD; Data POC), Rob Dungan (Kimberly, ID; Logistics POC), Paul White (Houma, LA; Technical POC), Kristen Veum (Columbia, MO; Data POC), Lisa Durso (Lincoln, NE), Hero Gollany (Adams, OR), Virginia Jin (Lincoln, NE), Jane Johnson (Morris, MN), Maysoon Mikha (Akron, CO), Catherine (Kate) Reardon (Adams, OR), Tom Ducey (Florence, NC), and Kerri Steenwerth (Davis, CA).
Overview: Meeting the needs of our growing 21st century population under anticipated climate shifts and extremes will require healthy resilient soils. Therefore, it is essential to enhance our nation’s soil health, and ensure that we have a robust living soil component – a component that sustains essential functions for healthy plants, animals, and environment - and that ultimately provides food for a healthy society.
The GRACEnet Soil Biology group is comprised of fifteen ARS scientists who are working together with the larger USDA-ARS GRACEnet community to provide soil biology component measurements across regions and to eliminate data gaps for GRACEnet and REAP efforts. The Soil Biology group is focused on efforts that foster method comparison and meta-analyses to allow researchers to better assess soil biology and soil health indicators that are most responsive to agricultural management and that reflect the ecosystems services associated with a healthy, functioning soil.
Mission: Soil biology data, including methods of identifying and quantifying specific organisms and processes they govern, are needed to evaluate impacts on agroecosystems and sustainable agricultural practices. This data collection effort is being accomplished in a highly structured manner to support current and future soil health and antimicrobial resistance research initiatives. The outcomes of the efforts of this team will provide a common biological data platform for several ARS databases, including: GRACEnet/REAP, Nutrient Use and Outcome Network (NUOnet), Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network, soil biology (e.g., MyPhyloDB) databases, and others.
Agricultural Collaborative Research Outcomes System (AgCROS)
For questions on the Soil Biology group, please contact:
Team coordinators:
Veronica Acosta-Martinez, PhD – Soil Biologist and Biochemist - Veronica.Acosta-Martinez@ars.usda.gov
Jane Johnson, PhD – Research Soil Scientist Jane.Johnson@ars.usda.gov
Dave Knaebel, PhD - National Program Leader – Soil Biology - David.Knaebel@ars.usda.gov
For more information, click here
