5 ms·

Related: biochar as a soil amendment https://biochar-international.org/biochar/ https://biochar-international.org/biochar/

by hosh 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago
Biochar turns out to be more effective in bacteria dominant soils than in fungal, where the fungi provide some of the same services. Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal. I don’t think it’s an accident that terra preta (a biochar + ? complex of soil) is found in Brazil. It’s also a reason we have to be careful about global warming. Temperate forests make great carbon sinks, tropical do not. If we tip more land into tropical we lose a powerful method of remediation.
- beamgirl 4y ago
  Fun fact to add about carbon sinks, peat bogs can sink 4-17 times as much CO2 per acre as a forest and acts as an incredible moisture regulator. One of my more out there dreams is to start a big man made peat bog at the edge of a desert.
  - dendrite9 4y ago
    This article from a year ago about peat in the Congo basin was a really interesting introduction to a peat bog I never knew even existed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peatlands-congo-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peatl...
  - legulere 4y ago
    Where would you get all the water for that? The defining characteristic of a desert is little precipitation.
    - beamgirl 4y ago
      I'd have to find somewhere with water near a desert, that's why I specified the edge. My understanding of how some deserts form is that farming techniques or other forces can cause a region to stop retaining water as well, and if this happens in a large enough area, it can lead to less rainfall etc. I remember reading about how herd animals trampling prairie grass and shitting all over it causes it to retain significantly more moisture during dryer times. My thought is that moisture regulating bogs could possibly at least stop deserts from expanding
      - culi 4y ago
        Most deserts are actually formed primarily due to abiotic features like geography. Usually if you see a desert, there's a nearby mountain range that that desert is in the shadow of, preventing it from getting much precipitation You're not wrong about the diminished abilities of a desert to hold water. More people drown in deserts every year than die of thirst. When it does rain it pools up and can easily create flash floods. The major problem is if you do try to start building any topsoil, these types of floods can wash away your years of work. It's a hard problem because you're both in desperate need of precipitation and desperate fear of it Techniques that could be used to combat this are things like the waffle gardens[0] that Zuni people have used for a long time, olla pot irrigation that have been in use in China and Northern Africa for over 4,000 years, and complex swale systems, or terracing systems like the Incans used to basically turn deserts into fertile ground[2] and might be the reason we today have potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes and a large number of other crops domesticated in the Andes I really think the biggest challenge is just shade though. The worst thing you could possibly do for soil is expose it to direct sunlight. One "geoengineer-y" idea I toy with that keeps coming up for me is what if we just built a bunch of large boxes made of wood or bamboo some other biodegradable material and just left them in the desert. All that you really need is something like the structures that shade covered parking lots. If you just make some large, flat, cheap structures like these you'd be able to provide what's possibly one of the most valuable resources in the desert: shade. Ultimately if you manage to start a soil ecology up, the whole issue solves itself. Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi hold 50x as much water as those that don't; the soil activity of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, etc also turn the large grained sandy soils into more loam-y soils that can support many more life forms and plants; the fine roots of plants that tend to grow in soils like these hold together soil better so less topsoil gets lost; plants that grow with mycorrhizal fungi are less susceptible to drought (as well as frost and basically every other stressors you can think of) and have much more access to nutrients. Basically all our problems go away if we can just get soil going. And plenty of desert plants already know this. Creosote bushes, nara melons, and the nitre bush are 3 examples that immediately come to mind. All of these slow growing plants have the strategy of simply providing shade and holding as much soil together as they can. And over time an incredible diversity of soil microbiomes form around the roots of these plants. The nitre bush also forms nabkhas[3] that capture other debris flying around and over time lessons the harshness of the desert winds, thereby lessening the rate of topsoil loss. Nature already has solutions. If we could just kickstart the process by providing the right microclimates we might be able to help these organisms stand a chance against the forces of desertification [0] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2021/11/waffle-gardens.html https://www.notechmagazine.com/2021/11/waffle-gardens.html [1] https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-use-olla-irrigation https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-use-olla-... [2] https://www.mayaincaaztec.com/inca/incaagriculture https://www.mayaincaaztec.com/inca/incaagriculture [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabkha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabkha
    - hosh 4y ago
      Defining characteristic of arid is little precipitation. Desert is more about sandy soil that supports sparse vegetation. If wasteland can accumulate organic material, and start rebuilding the soil, it starts retaining more water, which brings in more vegetation. This reverses desertification. There are some good examples of this in India. There are parts of the Arizona central canal which accidentally created bearms that also started this effect.
      - legulere 4y ago
        There are also deserts with rocks and not sand. The Sahara in most of its stretch is more rocky than sandy. Arid and desert climate are synonymous.
  - wiredfool 4y ago
    This is why we dig up peat bogs and burn them.
    - beamgirl 4y ago
      Which, as much as I love Islay scotch, is an ecological disaster
- detritus 4y ago
  Where can I learn more about what you've said, if you have sources to hand, please? I'm a big fan of bio-char (lol), so hearing that it's not-so good in temperate zones is disappointing to me, but interesting. Thanks :)
  - hosh 4y ago
    I don't know what the commentor meant, but I'm reading more as, there are other options in temperate zone perennials that are as effective as biochar. My favorite way of developing fungal-dominated soil is starting with a basin (for retaining water; I'm in AZ), and filling it with wood chips from chipdrop. The trees I do this with all love it. I know someone who started sourcing the waste product of mushroom cultivation. These are wood chips that have been "spent", (harvested the fruiting body) but would still have the mycelium to jumpstart this process. For growing annuals though, I think biochar is still a great option. Another possibility is, rather than looking at temperature, look at rainfall. Tropical forests gets a huge amount of rain, washing away nutrients. Biochar helps retain that. It might be that temperate rainforests would benefit more from biochar than building up fungal soil.
- culi 4y ago
  > Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal This seems like an impossible claim to back up but I would absolutely love to read if you have anything that would It's well-known that in general in the ecological succession of the soil food web, soils "start" out more bacteria dominated (corresponding with nitrogen generally being available more as nitrates and nitrites) and slowly turn to being more fungal dominated (corresponding with nitrogen being generally available more as ammonium or other harder to access forms that generally come along as the food web gets increasingly complex and trophic layers build up) By "start" up above I of course mean after a disturbance like a fire since we're talking about secondary succession (if we were talking about primary succession we'd be talking volcanoes and lichen turning rocks to soil). Therefore, I would expect the pattern to have a lot more to do with the amount of disturbance different areas are exposed to. Perhaps a lot of tropical areas can have intense monsoon seasons, but there are just as many examples I can think of of temperate areas with regular disturbances. In addition, I tend to think of the incredible diversity of orchid species in the tropics and many of these species often rely on a specific fungal species to even germinate. So I would also expect to see more diversity both in fungi and bacteria in the tropics Is any of my line of thinking on this misled? Would love to have it pointed out!

Related: biochar as a soil amendment https://biochar-international.org/biochar/ https://biochar-international.org/biochar/

by hosh 4y ago

Related: biochar as a soil amendment https://biochar-international.org/biochar/ https://biochar-international.org/biochar/

hinkley 4y ago

Biochar turns out to be more effective in bacteria dominant soils than in fungal, where the fungi provide some of the same services. Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal. I don’t think it’s an accident that terra preta (a biochar + ? complex of soil) is found in Brazil. It’s also a reason we have to be careful about global warming. Temperate forests make great carbon sinks, tropical do not. If we tip more land into tropical we lose a powerful method of remediation.

beamgirl 4y ago
Fun fact to add about carbon sinks, peat bogs can sink 4-17 times as much CO2 per acre as a forest and acts as an incredible moisture regulator. One of my more out there dreams is to start a big man made peat bog at the edge of a desert.
- dendrite9 4y ago
  This article from a year ago about peat in the Congo basin was a really interesting introduction to a peat bog I never knew even existed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peatlands-congo-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peatl...
- legulere 4y ago
  Where would you get all the water for that? The defining characteristic of a desert is little precipitation.
  - beamgirl 4y ago
    I'd have to find somewhere with water near a desert, that's why I specified the edge. My understanding of how some deserts form is that farming techniques or other forces can cause a region to stop retaining water as well, and if this happens in a large enough area, it can lead to less rainfall etc. I remember reading about how herd animals trampling prairie grass and shitting all over it causes it to retain significantly more moisture during dryer times. My thought is that moisture regulating bogs could possibly at least stop deserts from expanding
    - culi 4y ago
      Most deserts are actually formed primarily due to abiotic features like geography. Usually if you see a desert, there's a nearby mountain range that that desert is in the shadow of, preventing it from getting much precipitation You're not wrong about the diminished abilities of a desert to hold water. More people drown in deserts every year than die of thirst. When it does rain it pools up and can easily create flash floods. The major problem is if you do try to start building any topsoil, these types of floods can wash away your years of work. It's a hard problem because you're both in desperate need of precipitation and desperate fear of it Techniques that could be used to combat this are things like the waffle gardens[0] that Zuni people have used for a long time, olla pot irrigation that have been in use in China and Northern Africa for over 4,000 years, and complex swale systems, or terracing systems like the Incans used to basically turn deserts into fertile ground[2] and might be the reason we today have potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes and a large number of other crops domesticated in the Andes I really think the biggest challenge is just shade though. The worst thing you could possibly do for soil is expose it to direct sunlight. One "geoengineer-y" idea I toy with that keeps coming up for me is what if we just built a bunch of large boxes made of wood or bamboo some other biodegradable material and just left them in the desert. All that you really need is something like the structures that shade covered parking lots. If you just make some large, flat, cheap structures like these you'd be able to provide what's possibly one of the most valuable resources in the desert: shade. Ultimately if you manage to start a soil ecology up, the whole issue solves itself. Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi hold 50x as much water as those that don't; the soil activity of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, etc also turn the large grained sandy soils into more loam-y soils that can support many more life forms and plants; the fine roots of plants that tend to grow in soils like these hold together soil better so less topsoil gets lost; plants that grow with mycorrhizal fungi are less susceptible to drought (as well as frost and basically every other stressors you can think of) and have much more access to nutrients. Basically all our problems go away if we can just get soil going. And plenty of desert plants already know this. Creosote bushes, nara melons, and the nitre bush are 3 examples that immediately come to mind. All of these slow growing plants have the strategy of simply providing shade and holding as much soil together as they can. And over time an incredible diversity of soil microbiomes form around the roots of these plants. The nitre bush also forms nabkhas[3] that capture other debris flying around and over time lessons the harshness of the desert winds, thereby lessening the rate of topsoil loss. Nature already has solutions. If we could just kickstart the process by providing the right microclimates we might be able to help these organisms stand a chance against the forces of desertification [0] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2021/11/waffle-gardens.html https://www.notechmagazine.com/2021/11/waffle-gardens.html [1] https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-use-olla-irrigation https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-use-olla-... [2] https://www.mayaincaaztec.com/inca/incaagriculture https://www.mayaincaaztec.com/inca/incaagriculture [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabkha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabkha
  - hosh 4y ago
    Defining characteristic of arid is little precipitation. Desert is more about sandy soil that supports sparse vegetation. If wasteland can accumulate organic material, and start rebuilding the soil, it starts retaining more water, which brings in more vegetation. This reverses desertification. There are some good examples of this in India. There are parts of the Arizona central canal which accidentally created bearms that also started this effect.
    - legulere 4y ago
      There are also deserts with rocks and not sand. The Sahara in most of its stretch is more rocky than sandy. Arid and desert climate are synonymous.
- wiredfool 4y ago
  This is why we dig up peat bogs and burn them.
  - beamgirl 4y ago
    Which, as much as I love Islay scotch, is an ecological disaster
detritus 4y ago
Where can I learn more about what you've said, if you have sources to hand, please? I'm a big fan of bio-char (lol), so hearing that it's not-so good in temperate zones is disappointing to me, but interesting. Thanks :)
- hosh 4y ago
  I don't know what the commentor meant, but I'm reading more as, there are other options in temperate zone perennials that are as effective as biochar. My favorite way of developing fungal-dominated soil is starting with a basin (for retaining water; I'm in AZ), and filling it with wood chips from chipdrop. The trees I do this with all love it. I know someone who started sourcing the waste product of mushroom cultivation. These are wood chips that have been "spent", (harvested the fruiting body) but would still have the mycelium to jumpstart this process. For growing annuals though, I think biochar is still a great option. Another possibility is, rather than looking at temperature, look at rainfall. Tropical forests gets a huge amount of rain, washing away nutrients. Biochar helps retain that. It might be that temperate rainforests would benefit more from biochar than building up fungal soil.
culi 4y ago
> Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal This seems like an impossible claim to back up but I would absolutely love to read if you have anything that would It's well-known that in general in the ecological succession of the soil food web, soils "start" out more bacteria dominated (corresponding with nitrogen generally being available more as nitrates and nitrites) and slowly turn to being more fungal dominated (corresponding with nitrogen being generally available more as ammonium or other harder to access forms that generally come along as the food web gets increasingly complex and trophic layers build up) By "start" up above I of course mean after a disturbance like a fire since we're talking about secondary succession (if we were talking about primary succession we'd be talking volcanoes and lichen turning rocks to soil). Therefore, I would expect the pattern to have a lot more to do with the amount of disturbance different areas are exposed to. Perhaps a lot of tropical areas can have intense monsoon seasons, but there are just as many examples I can think of of temperate areas with regular disturbances. In addition, I tend to think of the incredible diversity of orchid species in the tropics and many of these species often rely on a specific fungal species to even germinate. So I would also expect to see more diversity both in fungi and bacteria in the tropics Is any of my line of thinking on this misled? Would love to have it pointed out!