Search for: All records

Synopsis Interdisciplinary collaborations are essential for addressing complex global challenges, yet forming and sustaining such teams is often hindered by institutional barriers, differences in discipline-specific languages, and cultural divides. Existing tools and platforms frequently fail to foster the deep, ongoing engagement necessary for successful interdisciplinary work. This paper proposes a novel web-based platform designed to stimulate and support interdisciplinary collaborations by integrating social media elements, such as user-friendly communication tools, algorithms for identifying and connecting individuals with complementary and unique skills, and smart suggestions for potential collaborators. The platform would facilitate building and maintaining the engagement of target users, and provide guardrails to engender community trust, with a goal to also tackle issues related to power dynamics, cultural differences, institutional structures, and varying levels of prestige or funding. By addressing these challenges, the proposed platform would enable and accelerate productive interdisciplinary research and collaborative ideation, and ultimately stimulate more innovative and effective solutions to complex scientific and societal problems. 

Barren, metal-contaminated soils lack plants and root exudate inputs, exhibit low microbial abundance and functioning, and often require soil revitalization to revegetate. While the effects of simulated root exudates (SRE) have been investigated in uncontaminated, vegetated soils, their potential for remediating post-industrial barren, contaminated soils has not been examined or leveraged. We asked whether priming brownfield soils with a laboratory-prepared SRE solution stimulates native soil microbial metabolism and functioning and how long the effects last. Moreover, we compared a cost-effective single SRE addition to repeated SRE additions. We collected soils from a metal-contaminated, abandoned industrial rail yard (barren and vegetated sites) and a vegetated agricultural reference site, established microcosms, and treated the soils with either a single or repeated SRE addition/s. By day 30, SRE-enriched barren, brownfield soils showed significantly higher soil respiration rates than the untreated control soils. Phosphatase activities were significantly higher even 210 days after a single SRE addition. Plants were introduced 282 days after the single SRE addition. The average shoot height (16 ± 0.3 cm) and total plant biomass (0.5 ± 0.02 g) of plants grown in single addition SRE enriched barren soil were significantly higher than the controls (9 ± 0.9 cm and 0.3 ± 0.02 g, respectively). The increased soil microbial functioning and productivity indicate that a single SRE application holds promise as a field-ready technology to revitalize barren, poorly functioning brownfield soils. SRE application may also be a pragmatic and innovative approach to enable successful phytoremediation and re-greening of industrial barrens.