We are looking to join a consortium investigating how climate change and disturbance affect below-ground biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and forest resilience.
UNICAM can provide field and laboratory assessment of forest soil biological quality through eDNA metabarcoding, bacterial and protist community profiling, soil microarthropod and earthworm indicators (QBS-ar and QBS-e), bait-lamina tests and ecotoxicological bioassays. These approaches can establish ecological baselines, detect changes in soil communities and food webs, and generate indicators of stress, recovery and resilience. The resulting biological data can be integrated with forest inventories, climatic variables, remote-sensing products and model outputs provided by other partners.
The team has led soil-biodiversity monitoring in protected areas, contributed to initiatives of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research.
Research group:
https://darwin.unicam.it/research/research_ID.php?lang=EN&ID=77
ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1244-1503
The University of Camerino (UNICAM) is a public research university in central Italy. The participating team is based at the School of Biosciences and Veterinary Medicine and operates across field, controlled-experiment and laboratory settings.
It can support sampling design, harmonised protocols, biological sample processing, molecular and functional analyses, indicator calculation and ecological interpretation. The team has led work packages and research tasks in European transnational, national and regional projects, collaborating with universities, research organisations, environmental authorities and protected-area managers.
