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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      Science [sciencemag.org] reports on soil research in the Netherlands:

Want to make your barren yard lush again? Just add a bit of soil from your local meadow. A new study reveals that the addition of foreign soil -- and more importantly, the organisms it contains -- can shape which plants will grow in the future. Such "inoculations" could even help bring back fallow farmlands and turn deserts green.

      "This is a really cool and remarkable study," says Harsh Bais, a root biologist at the University of Delaware, Newark, who was not involved in the work. "Dirt matters."

      [...]

        Small-scale studies in greenhouses have shown that adding the right soil can promote the growth of a particular plant community, and some researchers have even tried soil transplantation -- replacing one soil with another -- to get certain endangered plants to grow.

      Such need is great across the globe, where many once-fertile lands are turning into desert, and a significant amount of agricultural land is lost every year. What's more, when governments and nonprofit organizations try to bring back grasslands, forests, and other ecosystems destroyed by agriculture and other human uses, they are often disappointed: Restoration can take decades. It sometimes fails altogether.

      Researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology experimented with "booster shots"...adding soil layers using soil from other sources. In a side-by-side comparison they spread a 1cm-thick layer of soil from a different source over plots of degraded farmland, planted seeds and waited 6 years.

The source of the added soil greatly influenced what grew where, they report today in Nature Plants [nature.com]. Plots with heathland soil were covered with heather and gorse, whereas plots with grasslands soil were overflowing with a variety of grasses. The added soil made the existing land richer -- as the researchers found more nematode worms, more bacteria, and more fungi in those sections of the plots. Those with heathland soil also had a greater diversity of springtails and mites.

      Inspired by this research, land managers in the Netherlands are trying soil inoculation to promote restoration at 15 different sites.

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