Earthworm activity changes the soil’s pH balance and reduces fertility of the ground. — via healthing_ca
By: Vanessa Farnsworth
Earthworms long ago earned a sterling reputation as ecosystem engineers that excel at decomposing organic matter and mixing it into the soil. In doing so, they catalyze many changes in soil’s physical, chemical and biological structure. “If you take all of these tunnels into account, there’s a lot of space in the soil, so there’s a lot of air in the soil,” Ménard says. “In springtime, farmers want their soil to warm up. What is it that slows the warming of the soil? Water. That takes a lot of time to warm. If you don’t have lots of air in your soil, the water just sits there. If you have a lot of earthworms, you need a lot less heat from the sun to warm the soil.
In addition to runoff, earthworm activity changes the soil’s pH balance, reduces fertility, damages intricate root networks, throws the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio out of whack and leaves the soil surface bare, making it more susceptible to erosion, drought and temperature fluctuations. And there’s more.
“A shift in soil microbes from fungi to bacteria is one of the biggest impacts for our northern forests,” says Smith. “All the boreal has evolved under mycorrhizal associations because bacteria don’t survive well in the cold, wet conditions of boreal soils. The plants that are there are successful because of their associations with fungi. If you’ve got your soil microbes shifting from fungi to bacteria, what you see is fewer mushrooms on the forest floor. That’s a huge biodiversity shift.
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