Soil Incubators
One of my current projects involves incubating agricultural soils with different management histories to test how management and timing substrate addition affects soil respiration, nitrogen mineralization, and microbial community structure.
The soil is sitting in a modified vacuum filter unit with a 0.2 micron filter. Sitting on a teflon plug in the middle of the soil is an alkaline carbon dioxide trap (the little flask). When we seal the chamber we can measure total respiration, and when we open it and run water through the soil into the collection vessel in the bottom we can analyze the amount of nitrogen mineralized.
Cool, I want to take a look at these incubators sometime.
In the agricultural world, this could be invaluable to the farming process. What have you learned from your incubation process?