If you are interested in getting to know the worms on your farm, please do get involved in this survey, but you will have to be quick as it closes on 30th October!
However, if you are in the south eastern part of the country, until the last 24 hours, your soils will probably have been so dry that a lot of your worms may still have been deep in the profile or huddled up somewhere to keep themselves moist. They are probably now lying on the surface to avoid drowning!
The ambitious six-week programme to map the earthworm population of the UK builds on the success of a pilot study earlier this year when around 100 farmers volunteered 60 minutes to survey their fields; this time, many more are being asked to give up 30 minutes.
The inaugural national farmland #30minworms survey closes on 31 October – so not long to take part. It aims to help farmers to record their earthworm populations and to assess the effects of soil management, such as tillage and cover cropping, on soil health. Survey booklets can be downloaded here.
“If you think of soil health, the best place to start is with the ecosystem engineers – earthworms,” says Jackie Stroud, NERC Soil Security Fellow at Rothamsted Research who devised and leads the programme. The work is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with facilities provided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
Stroud notes the different values of the three main types of worms: “Not only do earthworms support crop productivity, but surface living worms are good prey sources for declining bird species; topsoil worms help aggregate soils, reducing their erodibility; and drainage worms, the deep-burrowing species, support water infiltration and deep crop rooting.”
Traditionally, farmland earthworm assessments have required up to 4 days of fieldwork per farm, followed by expert taxonomic analysis in a laboratory.
“Working with farmers, we have redesigned farmland earthworm surveys – culminating in a 30-minute test that generates robust and reliable data about the earthworm community structure,” says Stroud. “This information can be used to gauge soil health – what is working well, and where improvements could be made.”
“Don’t worry if you don’t know your surface dwellers from your deep burrowers,” Stroud says. “Half the people who took part in the pilot survey were unconfident in their earthworm ID skills…until they tried the online earthworm ID quiz, which comes with the booklet, before they headed for the fields.”
Find out more at http://www.wormscience.org/
