Research Objectives:
Until recently, scientists treated the soil as a black box, monitoring its physical and chemical status while ignoring the fate and identity of most members of the soil community. Now research has begun to put “names and faces” on key soil organisms that are vital to sustaining aboveground food chains and maintaining the health of our air, lands, and waters. The work of soil ecologists on the polar desert soil communities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys has been critical to this effort. These ultra-low-diversity systems, devoid of aboveground plant and animal life, with nematode worms at the top of the food chain, allow researchers to examine more easily the relationship between species diversity and key ecological processes.
Ms. Baskin plans to use her reporting in a book for general readers on the diversity and importance of life underfoot. The book will highlight the sharp decline in soil invertebrate populations in Taylor Valley during the last decade—apparently thanks to an anomalous cooling in that part of Antarctica—to illustrate how human activities affect even the earth’s smallest and most remote below ground creatures.
Ms. Baskin is a freelance science writer who has published two other books on ecological topics, both from Island Press: The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us (1997) and A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions (2002). Her articles have appeared in Natural History, Discover, Science, Atlantic Monthly, and numerous other magazines.
The author will spend three to four weeks in January 2004 working with and interviewing soil ecologists from the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER program and visiting their research sites in the Taylor Valley and at Battleship Promontory.
