"THE INVISIBLE PROCESSES IN SOIL: signaling and nutrient cycling between plats and soil organisms" is a lecture on the diversity and the importance of soil processes in the fuctioning ecosystems.

 

A diverse community of bacteria and fungi live in the soil, which plays a vital role in maintaining the diversity of plants and other organisms, as well in the circulation of various substances in the ecosystem. Among them there are disease-causing organisms that play important role in maintaining balance. On the other hand there is also fungi in the soil, which instead cooperate with plants by offering different services to each other.

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However, the most numerous are the mircobes, whose task is to recycle dead tissues. Studying these organisms and understanding their life is a great challenge, as they are invisible to the human eye and at the surface their life course is very different from that of humans.

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Marina Semtšenko: "In my lecture, I will try to explain the networks of underground interactions and give examples of how scientists study these invisible parts of the universe."