Today it's World Day to Combat Desertification. This year's theme is "Enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere", in line with the International Year dedicated to Biodiversity. With this theme, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification aims to sensitize the public to the fact that desertification, land degradation and drought dramatically affect the biodiversity resident in the soil.
One of the Drynet partners, PROBIOMA in Bolivia, works specifically on healthy soils. They have extensively looked at Trichoderma spp., a fungus that can be applied to improve soil fertility - "biorremediación" of the soils. Trichoderma enhances the biodiversity in the soils as a micro organism. Through Drynet mini-studies, this technique and its potential to remediate degraded soils in drylands has been tested in Chili and Iran as well, and the results are promising enough to continue the experiments.
Related documents and links:
Furthermore, the European Commission has just release a report called
Soil biodiversity: functions, threats and tools for policy makers (february 2010). This report states among others: "For instance, the consequences of soil biodiversity mismanagement have been estimated to be in excess of 1 trillion dollars per year worldwide." (page 8). Time for biorremediación!
