SOILutions
Learning arrangement: SOILutions | HOOU@TUHH
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Did you have your dinner today, or breakfast? Lunch? Wonder where (almost) all our food comes from? From soil. From healthy soil. What does healthy soil mean? What challenges do our soils face and what could be the solutions?
Explore the SOILutions project and find out more about this!
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https://lernen.hoou-tuhh.de/course/view.php?id=11
Overview
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.
Learning goals
The learning goals of the SOILutions project can be summarised under the following points:
- To learn about the importance of healthy soils for global food security
- To identify soil salinity and microplastic contamination as soil health challenges
- To gain practical insights into the use of compost for improving soil health
- To develop an overview of the different aspects of soil health for possible future research
Learning method
The project follows the research-based learning approach, with the main learning output consisting of three e-learning videos which talk about important soil health related topics. The videos cover three different experiments that were conducted at the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics (TUHH). With the help of the e-learning videos, the audience can follow the experiments step by step and gain insights into the topics covered by the experiments. The experiments are designed in such a way that makes them easy to follow for the audience. With a do it yourself or assisted do it yourself in laboratory experimental design, the project aims at imparting soil health education through visualized remote laboratory education.
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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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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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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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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.