Soil-Biodiversity

Soil health challenge

The French Living Lab (AgroForSoLL) focuses on agroforestry systems to improve soil health in agricultural land. The two soil health challenges addressed are the loss of soil organic carbon in mineral soils and the loss of soil biodiversity. Agroforestry systems offer a great potential to tackle such challenges, through the additional provision of carbon and habitats by the perennial component of the vegetation (trees/shrubs and understory plant community). The Living Lab will document how the combination of trees and crops, and their management, reduce soil degradation, while improving soil biodiversity. Alley-cropping with cereals/legumes is the dominant system amongst the twelve experimental sites, but two sites deal with hedges and another one with vegetable production. Half of the sites correspond to organic farming systems. By developing new tools and approaches to assess soil-biodiversity it aims to restore healthy, living soils that support sustainable agriculture and ecosystems.