Science works best when people work together. This is especially true for the big questions, that involve the whole world in all its complexity.
With our growing SoilTemp-database, that is exactly the type of questions we hope to answer: how are belowground temperatures across the world linked to the aboveground climate we all know, and how do these differences affect the distribution of species everywhere? And, most importantly: how are these belowground temperatures changing due to global change, and how is that impacting the biodiversity of everything that lives below or on the surface of our planet?
The growing SoilTemp-database, our main tool to answer these global-scale questions
Answering such ambitious large-scale questions will require input and expertise from scientists from all over the world. Luckily, the Flemish Research Council (FWO) understood this need, and now granted us with funding to set up an official Research Network.
Temperatures in the soil (like below this blanket of snow in the Norwegian mountains) are crucial to the life of so many organisms. Our goal is to improve our understanding of these soil temperatures at the global scale
For the next 5 year, the FWO gave us sufficient resources to bring together the leading experts on microclimate, species distributions and remote sensing from all over the world, to ultimately improve our understanding of where species are living and why.
We aim to make good use of that money, as we do strongly believe in the power of collaboration. Ideally, it will also turn Flanders into a knowledge hub for the worlds’ understanding of microclimate; a goal we are happy to contribute to.
The climate close to the soil surface is highly decoupled from what is measured in weather stations at 2 meter above the ground.
