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Vita: A Soil Community Monitoring Substance

A plan for developing a soil monitoring substance is available. The substance would be a feature of the Unified Lab of Lasting Forests. See also the unit on forest litter decomposition.

Vita Concept: Vita (as in "vital or having life") is a small plastic item for sale. They are of a known weight and when placed in an ecosystem are "decomposed" by soil organisms. The rate of change in weight (or dye concentrations) is an index to the vitality of the system. It is useful in ecosystem education, research, for evaluating progress in cleanup, and for expressing before/after effects of water discharge, pesticides, radioactive fallout, or pollution. Under design for years, the product has not been patented. I propose to produce the project in a lab on-site, gaining invaluable assistance from local chemists and engineers. The Vita component of Lasting Forests would then market the product which has use in ecology education, forest monitoring, use of pesticides (before/after analyses), waste area clean-up and reclamation, and in many other situations (even ruminant animal digestion studies). A patent will be sought. Product development is Year 1; field use in first half of Year 2; then marketing.

A dye release assay may be used (Poincelot and Day (1972), Moore et al. (1978), Khan and Franklin (1984), and Post and Beeby (1996)). Post and Beeby used 10 cellulose strips (2 x 5 cm) dyed with Remazol Brilliant Blue R (Sigma Chemical Co., St. Louis, MO, USA placed in nylon bags (0.2 mm mesh) and burried for 30 days. Cellulose decomposition was determined from the mean absorbance (595 mm) of the dye released from partially degraded strips compared to the mean for unburied control strips (Post and Beeby (1996)).

Post, R.D. and A.N. Beeby. 1996. Activity of the microbial decomposer community in metal contaminated roadside soils, J. Appl. Ecol 33:703-709

Khan, D.H. and B. Frankland. 1984. Observations on the biodegradability of cellulose in some metal contaminated grassland soils from Shipham in Somerset. Environmental and Experimental Botany 24: 145-149.

Poincelot, R.P. and P.R. Day. 1972. Simple dye release assay for determining celllulotic activity of fungi. Applied Microbiology 23:875-879.

Moore, R.L., B.B. Basset, and M.J. Swift. 1978. Developments in the Ramazol Brilliant Blue dye-release assay for studying the ecology of cellulose decomposition. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 11:311-312.

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Last revision January 17, 2000.