O Professor Matthew Goddard (Universidade de Lincoln, Reino Unido) é o coordenador do projeto SoilSalAdapt, em que o INIAV é parceiro, e é nosso convidado para uma palesta no próximo dia 14 de setembro das 15:30-16:30 no auditório do ITQB em Oeiras, inserida no ciclo “Plant Interaction Meetings” promovido pelo centro de investigação GREEN-IT.
No final da sessão haverá ainda espaço para discussão alargada em ambiente informal. Convidamos todos os interessados a participar!
About the session:
How to manage and protect soils to sustainably feed the world
Soils provide 98% of the world's food calories, but 70 years of intensive agriculture has significantly degraded soils. Traditional methods of increasing fertilisers and pesticides does not provide a sustainable future for soil health, especially given climate change. Microbes underpin soil fertility as they drive nutrient turnover, but soil microbial communities are still poorly understood due to their extreme complexity, and this has prevented a good understanding of how to manage soil biology. This talk will describe methods we are developing to better understand soil biology and how this may be managed to more sustainably grow food for future generations.
About the speaker:
Matthew Goddard undertook a PhD in evolutionary and ecological genetics at Imperial College and is currently the research leader of the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln. Mat has worked extensively with the agricultural sector both in New Zealand and in the UK. His research produced the first demonstration that microbes contribute to regional differences in agricultural produce. He now runs whole agri-ecosystem projects that fuse next-generation DNA sequencing to evaluate total soil and crop biodiversity (not just microbes) with environmental chemistry and crop biology with the aim of being able to augment agricultural microbiomes to minimise disease and elevate agricultural health and quality.
