Soil Health Indicators and Sustainable Practices on Indy Urban Farms: An Investigation of Ecosystem Functionality

Urban agriculture is capable of restoring ecosystem services like food production, recreation, and clean soil and water to cities. Urban farms in particular can help relieve pressure for areas with limited food access, also known as food desserts. This is especially important to the community of Indianapolis because the city is tied for the most food desert areas within a U.S. metropolitan area. To help a community, an urban farm must have healthy, nutrient rich soils. Nitrogen is the most limiting nutrient for plants when it comes to growth and development. Plants cannot produce nitrogen; they acquire the mineral by external inputs (mulch, manure, fertilizer etc.) or internal N-fixing bacteria. If biological nitrogen fixation increases, the immediate and long-term nitrogen supply would increase, leading to an increase in ecological sustainability. In addition to nitrogen, carbon is another mineral that can tell researchers a lot about the health of a soil system. Organic carbon is a major factor for plants, it promotes the structure, of soil, and it also acts as a pH buffer. The goal of this project is to test if common urban farming management processes are increasing the health of the ecosystem at the level of the soil. To analyze this, we looked at multiple different health indicators including: organic matter composition, percentage of carbon and nitrogen, carbon nitrogen ratio, soil pH, and bulk density of the soil samples collected. It is hypothesized that soil samples retrieved from actively farmed land will have increased health indicators. If this is true, farmed samples will be more similar to naturally established ecosystems than controlled, unfarmed samples with regard to the indicators tested. The soils used were collected from multiple sites around the city. Because of this, the data collected can be analyzed in a larger context with the goal of helping farms across Indianapolis restore fundamental ecosystem functions and improve overall sustainability

Report of the panel on the land surface: Process of change, section 5

The panel defined three main areas of study that are central to the Solid Earth Science (SES) program: climate interactions with the Earth's surface, tectonism as it affects the Earth's surface and climate, and human activities that modify the Earth's surface. Four foci of research are envisioned: process studies with an emphasis on modern processes in transitional areas; integrated studies with an emphasis on long term continental climate change; climate-tectonic interactions; and studies of human activities that modify the Earth's surface, with an emphasis on soil degradation. The panel concluded that there is a clear requirement for global coverage by high resolution stereoscopic images and a pressing need for global topographic data in support of studies of the land surface

Use of ground-truth measurements to monitor ERTS sensor calibration, volume 2

Application of ground-truth data to monitor sensor calibrations for Earth Resources Technology Satellites - Vol.

Mojave Applied Ecology Notes Summer 2010

Survey of monitoring and management for conservation of rare plants, Roadside restoration techniques in Joshua Tree NP, and an update on renewable energy developments in the Southwestern desert

Cryptic photosynthesis, Extrasolar planetary oxygen without a surface biological signature

On the Earth, photosynthetic organisms are responsible for the production of virtually all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. On the land, vegetation reflects in the visible, leading to a red edge that developed about 450 Myr ago and has been proposed as a biosignature for life on extrasolar planets. However, in many regions of the Earth, and particularly where surface conditions are extreme, for example in hot and cold deserts, photosynthetic organisms can be driven into and under substrates where light is still sufficient for photosynthesis. These communities exhibit no detectable surface spectral signature to indicate life. The same is true of the assemblages of photosynthetic organisms at more than a few metres depth in water bodies. These communities are widespread and dominate local photosynthetic productivity. We review known cryptic photosynthetic communities and their productivity. We link geomicrobiology with observational astronomy by calculating the disk-averaged spectra of cryptic habitats and identifying detectable features on an exoplanet dominated by such a biota. The hypothetical cryptic photosynthesis worlds discussed here are Earth-analogs that show detectable atmospheric biomarkers like our own planet, but do not exhibit a discernable biological surface feature in the disc-averaged spectrum.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, Astrobiology (TBP) - updated Table 1, typo in detectable O2 correcte