Ideal for horticulturalists, farmers, plant producers and gardeners, a soil microbiome course can help you understand the factors that lead to a healthy soil microbiome whether it is in farming, horticulture or plant production. When the soil microbiome is healthy, crops grow better and plants flourish, so they require less pesticides and chemicals.

Our Certificate of Soil Microbiome Management will teach you about soil texture, structure, nutrition and porosity, and the important indicators of soil health. You’ll also learn about soil fertility management and plant, environmental, human, pest and disease interaction and their impact on soil microbiomes

Learning Outcomes

Outcomes achieved by undertaking a soil microbiome course include:

• Learning about the nature of soil, topsoil thickness and soil structure, texture, porosity and soil structure research
• Exploring nutrient components, carbon and nutrient content, carbon retention and nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur
• Gaining an understanding of acidity (pH), salinity, drought, frost, erosion, water retention, environmental factors affecting soil health and other important indicators of soil health
• Studying the nature of soil microbes, bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi and protozoa
• Examining the scope of soil microbiome, plant-microbe relationships and microbe interrelationships
• Understanding changes to the soil microbiome and the definitions and concepts for understanding soil
• Attaining knowledge of measurement vs. monitoring in soil biology and things the soil microbiome can help measure or monitor
• Examining climate change, pollution and air pollution
• Understanding deposition and precipitation, erosion and microplastics
• Attaining knowledge of anti-microbials, antibiotic resistance and monocultures
• Gaining insights into soil substrates, inorganic substrate materials, perlite and vermiculite and sand and rockwool
• Learning about organic substrate materials, peat, coir and bark and soil-less substrates and microbes
• Exploring substrate technology, engineering and evaluation
• Gaining an understanding of novel technologies used in substrate management
• Studying tomography, rhizometrics, mini-horhizotron and rhizometers
• Examining manures and compost and inorganic, organic and fungal additives
• Understanding conventional vs organic soil management practices and soil carbon modelling
• Attaining knowledge of composting, cover crops, no-tillage farming and organic pest and disease control
• Gaining insights into weed control, rotational grazing and livestock management
• Learning about biodynamics and biodynamic preparations/sprays
• Exploring soil fertility management, soil management strategies, soil organic matter and cover and cocktail cover crops
• soil microbiome course.

And more!

Mapping Australia’s Soil Biodiversity 

As you’ll discover in our soil microbiome course, Australian soils can be incredibly diverse. The CSIRO’s Biomes of Australian Soil Environments (BASE) is a map of Australia’s soil microbial diversity, covering the entire continent. It has put Australia at the forefront of both understanding soil microbial biology and using genomics for environmental science.

The challenge

Soil microbes are vital for ecosystem health, supporting species diversity, soil fertility and the resilience of natural ecosystems. The soil microbiome is one of the most ecologically and genetically diverse communities on Earth, but is poorly understood. Soil microbes are difficult to measure in the field or culture in the lab. This has severely limited Australia’s ability to measure and manage soil microbial diversity to achieve positive outcomes for agriculture and the environment.

Mapping Australia’s microbiome

Working with custodians and land owners, BASE sampled soils from more than 1500 sites across Australia and the Antarctic, spanning the tropics, deserts, agricultural lands, coastal areas, alpine regions and beyond.

Understanding soil microbes

To identify the microbial species present in each soil sample, they used next-generation DNA sequencing, solving the challenge of handling more than 90 billion DNA sequences. Using new analytical and visualisation tools to enable people to use the terabyte scale data that results from deep sequencing of environmental samples, they built a comprehensive reference database (or map) of the Australian soil microbiome — Biomes of Australian Soil Environments (BASE).

It can be combined with other environmental data, including biological surveys, vegetation type, geochemical information and climate and meteorological data.

The results

BASE solved a major national science challenge by measuring and modelling the biological and functional diversity of Australia’s soil microbiome at a continental scale — a world first. It is a globally unique resource for environmental research and management.

Current use

BASE is now being used across the innovation sector, creating positive impacts for Australia in restoration biology, agriculture, mineral exploration, land management and the commercial development of soil-related products.

Forensic scientists are also using BASE as part of their work to develop a forensic framework of Australian soils, enabling better use of soil as a forensic tool and improved biosecurity assessments.

The Australian marine science community has adopted the BASE data management and public access model and is adding their data to produce a national combined land and sea microbiome dataset for Australia.

BASE is growing, with new contributors providing soil samples from across the continent. It continues to deliver value to diverse users across a broad sweep of sectors and, through this, positive impact for Australia.

BASE has more than 25 research partners and is led by:

• CSIRO
• Bioplatforms Australia
• Agriculture Victoria
• University of Adelaide.

BASE is now feeding into the Australian Microbiome initiative, which seeks to understand the function of microbes in the environment.

Australia’s Microbiome Project

In this soil microbial course, you will begin to understand that Australia’s microbiome is a hidden world of fungi, bacteria and archaea. From penicillin to beer, microscopic organisms are at the heart of many innovations.

Microbes comprise members of all three domains of life — archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. As communities, they function as a vital life force in our rivers, soils and seas.

Like the gut microbiome within each of us, environmental microbiomes maintain the general health and wellbeing of the environment. They also play an important role in suppressing disease and mitigating climate change. But what species are out there and what are they up to?

Australian Microbiome is a project run by a large group of science organisations across Australia. These groups are joining forces to understand the function of microbes in the environment.

As the CSIRO’s project science leader, Dr Andrew Bissett, says, “We want to provide fundamental information for management and monitoring of the environment. To do that, we need to begin to figure out the function that specific microbes are performing in different ecosystems. We also want to know what factors drive both microbial biodiversity and the relative abundance of different types of microbes.

Australia will then be in a much better position to take positive environmental management steps, like better predicting and managing algal blooms. Knowing more about microbes will let us work towards unimagined innovations in pharmaceuticals, biosecurity and mineral prospecting.”

The Mysteries of Australia’s Microbes

Australian Microbiome builds on two previous projects — BASE and Marine Microbes. These project began mapping Australia’s microbial biodiversity, discovering which microbes live where, by sequencing microbial DNA in soil and water samples.

As Bissett comments, “For a long time, our work was limited by not being able to grow most soil and marine microbes, or replicate complex microbial communities, in the lab. But the BASE and Marine Microbes projects overcame some of these challenges by reading microbial genes directly from the soil and water samples, using modern DNA sequencing methods.”

BASE mapped Australia’s soil microbiome, and soils were sampled from more than 1500 sites across the continent, including Australia’s Antarctic Territory. It generated 90 billion DNA sequences and revealed hundreds of thousands of microbial species living in our soils, many of them newly discovered.

The national soil and marine microbial datasets generated by BASE and Marine Microbes are free, publicly available resources that combine microbial IDs with information on things like local climate, land use, marine chemistry and plant species growing nearby. The datasets continue to grow as new sites are sampled, using consistent techniques to ensure the results are comparable.

 

Develop a comprehensive understanding of soil science as it relates to a healthy microbiome with a soil microbiome course such as our Certificate of Soil Microbiome Management.