Welcome to our website
We are the Soil Biomass Group in the Sustainable Soils and Grassland Systems Department of Rothamsted Research. The group, led by Professor Phil Brookes, has been researching the size, activity and characteristics of the microbial biomass in soil for the past three decades. Novel methods and their applications have been developed to assist in our investigations of the role of the microbial biomass, increase our understanding of the functions that it performs, and better understand the impact of anthropogenic activities upon it.
We hope you find this mini-web useful; there is information about some of our current projects, the people working in the group, some of the methods we use and links to other relevant sites. Please contact us if you would like us to include a link to your site, to let us know if any of the links are not working properly, or with any other feedback about the site or our work.
In October 2007 Phil Brookes and Qimei Lin organised a very successful joint China-BBSRC Workshop, 'Evaluation of Soil Microbial Parameters as Indicators of Soil Quality', held at China Agricultural University, Beijing. To download the video showing pictures of workshop participants, click here (please note it is 56MB) and to download the programme including abstracts of the presentations, click here.