Well done to our Marta Crispo on her two recent publications on soil health!
Grantham Scholar Marta Crispo works out of the School of Biosciences and Geography. Her research looks at soil black carbon’s affect on the availability of heavy metals to own-grown food crops. Recently, she published 2 papers related to her research. Here, you can find a brief outline of them and links to read the papers in full.
The first paper looks at UK urban soils used for growing food. Topics covered include: heavy metals (HM) concentrations across UK urban horticultural soils and the major factors influencing soil HM bioavailability to food crops.
Findings from the paper show that soil total HM concentrations are generally below UK soil screening values and their availability to food crops are low. Plus soil black carbon influences both total and bioavailable HM concentrations.
The focus of this paper is black carbon’s (BC) influence on soil organic carbon mineralisation. Specifically, the stability of BC in soil over short timescales.
It was found that BC-soot reduced the mineralisation of added organic carbon by 18%. Plus, BC-biochar did not influence the mineralisation of added organic carbon. Further, there was a cumulative loss of 0.17% 13C from BC-soot over six months.
This paper is published by Science of The Total Environment.
If you want to here more about Marta, the check out this interview we did with her about the Time is Now mass lobby. And if you want a list of all Marta Crispo’s publications then look at her profile page.