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DURHAM, N.C. – , professor of soils and forest ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at 91��������, has received a $425,000, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to create the world’s first international network for the long-term study of global soil change.

The grant, funded through NSF’s Research Coordination Network, will support the creation of the new Global Soil Change Community (GSCC), headquartered at the Nicholas School.

GSCC will fill a critical void in environmental science today, Richter says, by promoting a broad approach to soil science “that makes use of interdisciplinary expertise to inform scientists, students, teachers and policymakers alike about global soil change – not only what’s occurring below ground, but what those changes mean for us above ground, too.”

One of GSCC’s major challenges, he says, will be the networking of the world’s long-term soil studies, in which scientists monitor and measure long-term changes occurring in the Earth’s soil, similar to networks already established to study long-term changes in weather, wildlife populations, water and air quality and other environmental systems.

With support from Duke’s Center on Global Change, Richter and students from Duke, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have assembled a searchable online inventory of more than 160 research sites worldwide.  They are evaluating the sites to determine which should be included in the new GSCC network. The inventory can be downloaded at.

“Some of the world’s best test sites, especially those in developing nations, are vulnerable to loss due to budgetary cuts, the retirement of senior researchers, deterioration of infrastructure or instability of local governments,” Richter says. “In South Africa, for example, there’s a 30-year study on agricultural soil productivity that was recently discontinued when a principal investigator retired.  This study produced many peer-reviewed papers on soil’s response to management, but now it’s gone. We can’t afford to let that happen to other sites.” 

Research conducted at the sites Richter hopes to network utilize two different but complementary approaches to studying how soils change over time, he notes.  Some researchers conduct permanent plot studies – also called long-term soil experiments (LTSEs) – in which soil change is directly estimated by sampling the same plots periodically over time. Others conduct chronosequence studies, in which soil change is indirectly estimated by sampling multiple plots that share some key characteristics but differ in age or 91�������� of development.

“LTSEs allow you to measure changes that span years or decades. Chronosequence studies allow you to measure changes that span centuries or millenia,” Richter says.  “Together, they provide a detailed, long-term perspective on how and why the Earth’s soil is changing, and how soil interacts with wider environmental systems.”

GSCC will leverage resources of two existing soil science projects, the LTSE Networking Project and the Critical Zone Exploratory Network, to conduct and evaluate much of the research. 

To communicate the new research findings, it will host annual workshops themed around new or pressing environmental issues, such as carbon cycling or soil contaminants. Most workshops will be held at Duke. GSCC will use funds from its NSF grant, and from other, future grants that may follow, to underwrite the cost of student participation in the workshops. 

Richter also plans to sponsor undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral research and training programs, and is already working to establish a comprehensive online database and reference library on global soil change.    

“Our goal is for GSCC to become a universal resource where people from all walks of life – scientists, students, policy analysts, farmers, foresters and others – can turn for accurate and timely information,” he says.  

“Soil plays a key role in controlling the biogeochemistry of our atmosphere, oceans and freshwaters. We know it’s integrally connected to global climate change. And we know that the Earth’s soil is changing rapidly, driven largely by human impacts. But despite all this, remarkably little is understood about the rate of these changes and the processes driving them, ” Richter says. “Clearly, a new approach is needed.  GSCC is one step in that direction.”