Under Ground

How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World

Yvonne Baskin, Scope

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781597261180
  9781597260039
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597269384
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Let's get dirty. In childhood, the back yard, the flowerbed, the beach, the mucky place where land slips into puddles, lakes, and streams are infinitely fascinating. It is a mistake to leave that "childish" fascination with mud and dirt behind. The soils of the Earth, whether underneath our feet or pressurized beneath tons of ocean water, hold life in abundance. A handful of garden dirt may harbor more species than the entire aboveground Amazon.
 
The robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity made headlines as they scraped their way across the Martian landscape, searching for signs of life. But while our eyes have been turned toward the skies, teeming beneath us and largely unexplored lies what Science magazine recently called the true "final frontier." A growing array of scientists is exploring life in soils and sediments, uncovering a living world literally alien to our own senses--and yet one whose integrity turns out to be crucial to life above ground.
 
Yvonne Baskin takes the reader from the polar desert of Antarctica to the coastal rain forests of Canada, from the rangelands of Yellowstone National Park to the vanishing wetlands of the Mississippi River basin, from Dutch pastures to English sounds, and beyond. She introduces exotic creatures--from bacteria and fungi to microscopic nematode worms, springtails, and mud shrimp--and shows us what scientists are learning about their contribution to sustaining a green and healthy world above ground. She also explores the alarming ways in which air pollution, trawl fishing, timber cutting, introductions of invasive species, wetland destruction, and the like threaten this underground diversity and how their loss, in turn, affects our own well being.
 
Two-thirds of the world's biological diversity exists in soils and underwater sediments, and yet most of us remain unaware of these tiny multitudes that run the planet beneath the scenes. In Under Ground, Baskin reveals the startling ways in which that life, whether in our own back yards, in fields and forests, or in the furthest reaches of the Earth, is more numerous, significant, and fascinating than we once imagined.

Notes

I. INTRODUCTION: Opening the Black Box

1

Kerr, R. A. 2004. Opportunity tells a salty tale. Science 303: 1957.

2

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. 2003. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc.

3

Richter, D. D. and D. Markewitz. 1995. How deep is soil? BioScience 45: 600–609. Quote p. 600.

4

Usher, M. B. 1985. Population and community dynamics in the soil ecosystem. In Ecological Interactions on Soil: Plants, Microbes and Animals, ed. A. H. Fitter, 243–265. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.

5

Brussaard, L. et al. 1997. Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in soil. Ambio 26: 563–570.

6

Snelgrove, P. R. et al. 1997. The importance of marine sediment biodiversity in ecosystem processes. Ambio 26: 578–583.

7

Wilson, E. O. 1997. The little things that run the world: the importance and conservation of invertebrates. Conservation Biology 1: 344–346.

8

Soil Quality Institute, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Biology Quick Facts, online at http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/soil_quality/soil_biology/index.html.

9

Whitman, W. B., D. C. Coleman, and W. J. Wiebe. 1998. Prokaryotes: the unseen majority. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95: 6578–6583.

10

Gross, M. 1996. Life on the Edge: Amazing Creatures Thriving in Extreme Environments. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

11

Treonis, A. M., D. H. Wall, and R. A. Virginia. 2000. The use of anhydrobiosis by soil nematodes in the Antarctic Dry Valleys. Functional Ecology 14: 460–467.

12

Smith, M. L., J. N. Bruhn, and J. B. Anderson. 1992. The fungus Armillaria bulbosa is among the largest and oldest living organisms. Nature 356: 428–431.

13

Ferguson, B. A. et al. 2003. Coarse-scale population structure of pathogenic Armillaria species in a mixed-conifer forest in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon. Canadian Journal of Forestry Research 33: 612–623.

14

Coleman, D. C. and D. A. Crossley Jr. 1996. Fundamentals of Soil Ecology. San Diego: Academic Press.

15

Wilson, The little things that run the world.

16

Wall, D. H., A. Fitter, and E. A. Paul. In press. Developing new perspectives from advances in soil biodiversity research. In Biological Diversity and Function in Soils, ed. R. D. Bardgett, M. B. Usher, and D. W. Hopkins. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

17

Daily, G. C. 1995. Restoring value to the world’s degraded lands. Science 269: 350–354.

18

Pimentel, D. et al. 1995. Environmental and economic costs of soil erosion and conservation benefits. Science 267: 1117–1123. But see also Kaiser, J. 2004. Wounding earth’s fragile skin. Science 304: 1616–1618.

19

Wall, D. H., G. Adams, and A. N. Parsons. 2001. Soil biodiversity. In Global Biodiversity in a Changing Environment: Scenarios for the 21st Century, ed. F. S. Chapin III, O. E. Sala, and E. Huber-Sannwald, 47–82. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

20

For example, the member nations of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) decided at the 6th Conference of the Parties meeting in Nairobi in April 2002 (COP decision VI/5, paragraph 13) “to establish an International Initiative for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Soil Biodiversity as a cross-cutting initiative within the programme of work on agricultural biodiversity, and invites the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and other relevant organizations, to facilitate and coordinate this initiative.” See the CBD Web site at http://www.biodiv.org/default.aspx and the FAO Web site at http://www.fao.org/ag/agl/agll/soilbiod/fao.stm.

21

Baskin, Y. 1997. The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us. Washington, D.C.: Island Press; and Baskin, Y. 2002. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books.

22

Wall, D. H., ed. 2004. Sustaining Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Soils and Sediments. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

23

Ward, P. D. and D. Brownlee. 2002. The Life and Death of Planet Earth. New York: Times Books.

24

Fortey, R. 1998. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Quote p. 49.

25

Schwartzman, D. W. and T. Volk. 1989. Biotic enhancement of weathering and the habitability of Earth. Nature 340: 457–460.

26

Coleman and Crossley, Fundamentals of Soil Ecology.

27

Pimentel, D. et al. 1993. Soil erosion and agricultural productivity. In World Soil Erosion and Conservation, ed. D. Pimentel, 277–292. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

28

Coleman and Crossley, Fundamentals of Soil Ecology.

29

Richter and Markewitz, How deep is soil?

II. Where Nematodes Are Lions

1

I visited Antarctica in the 2003–2004 season as a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

2

For an overview of the Taylor Valley ecosystems, see the six articles in a Special Section on the McMurdo Dry Valleys, BioScience 49 (12), December 1999.

3

Baldwin, J. G., S. A. Nadler, and D. H. Wall. 1999. Nematodes: Pervading the Earth and linking all life. In Nature and Human Society: The Quest for a Sustainable World, ed. P. H. Raven and T. Williams, 176–191. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

4

Barrett, J. E. et al. 2004. Variation in biogeochemistry and soil biodiversity across spatial scales in a polar desert ecosystem. Ecology 85: 3105–3118.

5

Scott, R. F. 1905. The Voyage of the Discovery, Vol. II. London: Macmillan.

6

Dougherty, E. C. and L. G. Harris. 1963. Antarctic Micrometazoa: Fresh-water species in the McMurdo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• A SHEARWATER BOOK
• Under Ground - How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I - INTRODUCTION
• II - Where Nematodes Are Lions
• III - Of Ferns, Bears, and Slime Molds
• IV - The Power of Ecosystem Engineers
• V - Plowing the Seabed
• VI - Microbes, Muck, and Dead Zones
• VII - Fungi and the Fate of Forests
• VIII - Grazers, Grass, and Microbes
• IX - Restoring Power to the Soil
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index