Cyanobacteria are now being used in China to shore up the verges of roads and railways in northern China as well as the margins of oases and farmland. A team plans to seed 133 square kilometer of desert over the next five years. The bacteria creates 0.5 to 1.0 centimeter thick biocrust over the desert which helps topsoil to reform and prevents top soil erosion.
People have been trying to use bacteria in this way since the 1980s, says Matthew Bowker, a soil ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His group is working on a similar method, but hasn't yet used it on a large scale. China is willing to put in the money to scale the process.
Planting hardy grasses helps keep sand in place, but the wind can still whip away particles between the grasses. So Chunxiang Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan has developed an alternative approach. She coats planted dunes with a mixture of photosynthesising cyanobacteria that can thrive in the semi-arid environment.
China has run a trial for eight years and is scaling it up now
Grown in nearby ponds, the cyanobacteria are trucked into the desert every few days and sprayed over the dunes, where they form sticky filaments that hold soil particles in place and prevent them from being blown away. Cyanobacteria get their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis, and as part of the chemical reactions involved, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and provide the organic matter the soil needs to be productive.
Hu's long-running trial shows that after eight years, dunes treated with cyanobacteria developed a biological crust nearly 1 centimetre thick when on the shady side of dunes. On the sunny side, the crust was about half as thick. The topsoil improved where the crust developed, spurring plant growth
Environmental Science Technology - Artificially Accelerating the Reversal of Desertification: Cyanobacterial Inoculation Facilitates the Succession of Vegetation Communities
Read more published on Next Big Future // visit site
People have been trying to use bacteria in this way since the 1980s, says Matthew Bowker, a soil ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His group is working on a similar method, but hasn't yet used it on a large scale. China is willing to put in the money to scale the process.
Planting hardy grasses helps keep sand in place, but the wind can still whip away particles between the grasses. So Chunxiang Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan has developed an alternative approach. She coats planted dunes with a mixture of photosynthesising cyanobacteria that can thrive in the semi-arid environment.
China has run a trial for eight years and is scaling it up now
Grown in nearby ponds, the cyanobacteria are trucked into the desert every few days and sprayed over the dunes, where they form sticky filaments that hold soil particles in place and prevent them from being blown away. Cyanobacteria get their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis, and as part of the chemical reactions involved, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and provide the organic matter the soil needs to be productive.
Hu's long-running trial shows that after eight years, dunes treated with cyanobacteria developed a biological crust nearly 1 centimetre thick when on the shady side of dunes. On the sunny side, the crust was about half as thick. The topsoil improved where the crust developed, spurring plant growth
Environmental Science Technology - Artificially Accelerating the Reversal of Desertification: Cyanobacterial Inoculation Facilitates the Succession of Vegetation Communities
Read more published on Next Big Future // visit site