GRASS4FUN

Context

Natural grasslands and cereal fields play a fundamental role in supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable food production. They provide multiple ecosystem services, but also involve significant trade-offs (e.g. food production vs. soil carbon sequestration). Yet, unlike aboveground plants and animals, the capacity of European protected areas to conserve plant and soil microbial diversity and ecosystem services in natural grasslands under global environmental changes is virtually unknown. Moreover, we know very little about how cereal fields will respond to multiple co-occurring global change stressors, such as drought, pesticides and over-fertilisation, which are threatening the conservation of soil biodiversity and function as well as food production.

Main objectives

GRASS4FUN will combine European-wide observational and experimental approaches to meet four research objectives. Objectives 1 & 2 will evaluate whether protected areas promote soil biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services in European natural grasslands, and will additionally monitor the microbial diversity and function in cereal fields. In Objectives 3 & 4, GRASS4FUN will further investigate whether multiple global change stressors impact the microbiome and function of European natural grasslands and cereal fields.

Main activities

We will conduct a European-level survey across grasslands’ triplets with different land-use intensities (from protected and unprotected natural grasslands to maize and wheat fields). The sampling in cereal fields will support the monitoring that the Global Crop Microbiome Initiative started in these sites 3-5 years ago. We will further combine the modelling and mapping of soil biodiversity and function across climate and land cover change scenarios with a manipulative study using microcosms subjected to multiple global change stressors.