Ponies for soil health
Meeting our visiting Exmoor Ponies at Cuckoo Tors ecology research site near Buxton! We are managing this land to benefit nature and natural processes and the ponies are all part of the plan – provided through the Wild Peak Grazing Network with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust . Who would have thought as a microbiologist I would have got involved with land management and ponies? I certainly did not expect this, but the reason is because ecosystems are complex “systems” within which microbes play a major role – but usually not very appreciated and poorly understood.
In order to understand and research the roles of micobes in landscapes, the context is everything – no point characterising the microbes if we don’t understand the system they are part of, and the system ought to be something relevant to real-world landscape situations too. This has been a major challenge for me but with projects like this I feel I am making good progress now. I’m learning about landscapes and thier management, with the help of external experts like the wildlife trusts staff and more knowledgeable colleagues like Eleanor Atkins and Anne Danby in our Landscape Ecology and Ecosystem Functions (LEEF) research group at Derby.
There is a video on ITV where Alex Fisher explains how the ponies benefit the land here . One aspect is spreading of seed and impacting the ground – we obseved both on site yesterday and you can see in the photo that the ponies have seed trapped in their hair. Although we are not immediately looking into the microbial ecology implications in this case, I’m sure that the soil health improvements will be reflected in the soil microbial community composition and function.
We regularly survey this site with our students on Biology and Zoology programmes at University of Derby, as part of our approach to involving students in research and real-world projects. I look forward to bringing the students here next and building up our datasets of plant community biodiversity and aerial imagery.