Institut für ökologische Chemie, Pflanzenanalytik und Vorratsschutz
The projects aims to collect digital data of an organically farmed agricultural holding as well as environmental data in a way that the data can serve as a basis for the decision and evaluation of the holding to achieve optimal ecological, social, and regional economic outcomes. The project has three main aims:1. Identification and mostly automated assessment of system parameters (e.g., land-use type, soil health, climate regulation, biodiversity, etc.). These data should be used to thoroughly evaluate the impact of an agricultural holding on the environment and society. This concept will be explored in cooperation with an agricultural holding near Alt Madlitz (Brandenburg, Germany). This holding will serve as an example for the transition towards multifunctionality and sustainable land use in agriculture. The obtained data will serve as the basis for a monetary evaluation of the economic, ecological, and social aspects of sustainability in agriculture.2. Development and application of digital solutions to minimize the personnel and technical efforts for the measurement of environmental and economic data of multifunctional land-use systems. This will result in the development of a “Minimum Viable Product“ (MVP) – a simply and economically viable system that can be used by other agricultural holdings. 3. Identification of field of action for the application of the evaluation systems that are part of the economic cost-benefit calculation (positive and negative external effects of the agricultural holding). The integration of ecological and social data in conventional calculations of success (e.g., annual balance) will also be considered.The projects aims to assess soil functions related to biodiversity and climate regulation under different land-use systems. For the assessment of biodiversity parameters, we aim to quantify soil microorganisms using real-time PCR. This will enable us to evaluate effects of certain agricultural management practices. Furthermore, we aim to investigate earthworm communities (population density, community composition, and diversity). Identification of earthworm species will be performed by combining morphological identification with molecular tools. Additionally, we will determine soil greenhouse gas fluxes of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide in real time in the field using a FTIR sensor. Repeated measurements will enable us to interpolate annual fluxes of greenhouse gases and thus evaluate different land-use systems for their contribution of climate regulation. These investigations will be coupled to the determination of soil organic carbon. In addition to the relative proportion of organic C in soil, we will determine soil bulk density and calculate soil organic carbon stocks per area unit, which allows us to evaluate the amount of carbon stored in soil under different land-use types.
Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
