Earthworms rule

Much excitement today in my very small corner of the virtual world. Apparently our paper on earthworm calcite balls is the most downloaded paper from Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta over the last 90 days.

In the mean time we have had another project start. This is a BESS (Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) funded project from the NERC (Natural Environment Research Council). Working with Paul Eggleton at the Natural History Museum and Ron Corstanje at Cranfield University we'll be investigating controls on the biodiversity of earthworms in pasture systems to see whether modern agricultural techniques threaten our earthworm biodiversity (and all the good things that they do for soils) or not. David Jones at the Natural History Museum will be leading the earthworm identification end of the project and Jo Witton will be working in York analysing all the soil samples (800 hundred of them).

Jo, practising our method for determining microbial activity in soil samples.