Search relates to :	Action A (classic collaboration research projects)
Looking for :	a project to join
Title :	Mr. Msc.
Name :	Lieven Waeyenberge
Country :	België, Belgium
Institute name :	ILVO (Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food)
Department / section :	Plant
E-mail :	lieven.waeyenberge@ilvo.vlaanderen.be
Telephone :	+3292722467
Web address :	Burg. Van Gansberghelaan 96
Link to research gate or equivalent :	https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lieven_Waeyenberge
My expertise / skills :	Assessment of soil health through complete analysis of the soil food web is technically daunting. Alternate to this is the use of biotic indicators of soil health but any indicator should reflect the structure and function of ecological processes and must respond to soil conditions. Nematodes are believed to fulfill these requirements. Nematodes (mesofauna-biological regulator) are a diverse, highly speciated group of organisms. In the soil, they occur across multiple trophic levels making them vitally important in the soil environment and are frequently the most abundant and diverse invertebrates present, they are more sensitive to changes in soil environment compared to other organisms due to their permeable cuticle, numerous species can withstand anaerobic conditions and desiccation which benefits their survival, their generation time (days to years) is longer than metabolically active microbes (hours to days) making them more stable temporally and not simply fluctuating with nutrient flushes, they can be sampled in all seasons. We have developed a method to monitor shifts in nematode communities based on an NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) tool: DNA-metabarcoding or amplicon sequencing. This high-throughput method is capable of characterizing nematode communities from >150 soil samples in one run.
Disciplines I am working on :	Agriculture Crop Production Plant Protection Population Biology Selection using molecular markers
Keywords :	agriculture, bioindicator, disease, health, monitoring, nematode, plant, quality, soil, suppressiveness
Project description :	Loss of soil biodiversity caused by the expansion, intensification and mechanisation of agriculture has been identified as a major problem across Europe. Quality improvement and sustainable management of soils require soil health monitoring, including biological indicators, to relate land use and soil management to soil biota diversity and soil functioning. A panel of approximately 50 European soil biology researchers scored a list of methods to recommend cost effective and policy-relevant biological indicators for European monitoring of soil biodiversity and ecosystem functions. They ranked nematodes at the top of the list ( Griffiths B.S. et al. 2016. Selecting cost effective and policy-relevant biological indicators for European monitoring of soil biodiversity and ecosystem function. Ecological Indicators 69, 213-223). As mentioned above, we have developed a high-throughput molecular method to monitor shifts in nematode communities. Therefor I would like to present this method as a monitoring tool for projects investigating the advantage of an increased biodiversity on plant health (especially crop quality and yield) and certain ecosystem services like enhanced nutrient reconversion (preventing leaching of N and P), higher soil disease suppressiveness, improved soil structure (preventing erosion) etc. All of which nematodes have an important role on.
Networking opportunities :	-7th International Congress of Nematology - ICN 2020 (https://www.alphavisa.com/icn/2020/index.php)