Annual Conference 2021: Soil Health – Professor Dr. Matthias C. Rillig

The British Society of Soil Science’s Annual Conference 2021, sponsored by Arcadis, considered soil health from five different perspectives, providing insight into a prominent topic across professional and academic practice.

Professor Dr. Matthias C. Rillig presented “How multiple factors of global change affect soil processes and biodiversity”. Soils are crucial for understanding effects of factors of global change. Global environmental change is inherently a multi-factor phenomenon including a wide range of very different stressors, yet the simultaneous impact of more than two such drivers is rarely studied in experiments. Professor Rillig’s experiments show that the number of factors/ stressors acting on soils is an important aspect to consider, highlighting that it is crucial to limit the impact of an ever-increasing number of stressors on soils.