Faculty and students from BESS, led by Dr. Sean Schaeffer, are partnering with staff from the National Cooperative Soil Survey, part of the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), to quantify dynamic soil properties in key ecological sites across the state of Tennessee. The grant, totaling over $300,000, is part of a larger, $1.9 million, investment in collaborative research by the NRCS. The team will combine conventional methods with state of the art sequencing techniques to measure soil chemical, physical, and biological properties that control soil organic carbon stocks. By providing information describing the interactions among soils, vegetation, and land management, this research will be used by NRCS for conservation planning operations on all rangeland, forest land, pastureland, hay land and grazed cropland. The news releases can be found here: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/newsroom/releases/?cid=NRCSEPRD1473217 and https://ag.tennessee.edu/BESS/Documents/FY2019%20Collaborative%20Soils%20Research%20Grant_UT%20Knox.pdf