This $749,832 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture will fund research at the University of Idaho from October 2021 through September 2025 under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program.
The grant aims to improve soil health management strategies and identify their implications for soil function and diversity. Key research objectives include determining the interactive effects of cover crop diversity, intercropping, compost addition, and livestock-crop integration on carbon and nitrogen cycling as well as microbial community composition, diversity and function. Additionally, the project will examine how multiple soil health practices influence soil resilience to factors like warming, precipitation and salinity regimes. Researchers will pair a common garden experiment with stable isotope tracing to study soil microbial communities while soils are exposed to simulated global change conditions. Results are intended to illustrate synergies between management practices and their impacts on soil biogeochemistry and microbes, as well as soil resistance and resilience. The grant will provide links between soil metrics and microbial communities under changing environmental conditions.
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