Scheyern, Germany

EcoFINDERS at Scheyern

The European Commission (EC) funded FP7 project ‘EcoFINDERS’,

Ecological Function and Biodiversity Indicators in European Soils, is designed to provide the EC with tools to design and implement soil strategies aimed at ensuring sustainable use of soils, including:

• Characterization of European soil biodiversity;
• Determination of relations between soil biodiversity, soil functions and ecosystem services;
• Design of policy-relevant and cost-effective indicators for monitoring soil biodiversity.

Central to the project is the testing of a range of biological indicators at a series of sites that have replicated plots of land management strategies at sites representative of the European climatic zones. In many cases, such as at Scheyern (Bavaria, Southern Germany), this requires the consent of the local land owners and land managers. The free exchange of data collected on site means that the land owners benefit from the additional and complementary information generated by the EcoFINDERS scientists, while the EcoFINDERS project benefits from the long-term treatments already in place that could not be established within the lifetime of the project.

The photographs show the general layout of the Scheyern site during a sample in the autumn of 2012 and a detail of the replicated tillage treatments with a scientist from one of the two German partners (ECT Oekotoxikologie GmbH) hard at work sampling earthworms (one of the indicators of both biodiversity and ecosystem services).