Soil Microbial Activity During Hydrogel Degradation: Environmental Implications of a Water-Retention Technology

• Grant number: 25/11395-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: August 17, 2025
• End date: February 16, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Agricultural Engineering - Soil and Water Engineering
• Principal Investigator: Fernando Ferrari Putti
• Grantee: Lívia Valentim Sanches
• Supervisor: David Leonard Jones
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Engenharia. Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Tupã. Tupã , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Bangor University, Wales
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/09752-0 - Development, characterization and evaluation of hydrogels with controlled-release fertilizers, BP.MS

Abstract

Due to global warming, climate change has been intensifying increasingly, altering the rainfall regime and increasing the heat that reaches the planet, which consequently affects food production in general. Thus, in this way, managing the soil with new technologies for water retention is necessary to make it available at the ideal time for the development of the plant. Thus, the use of hydrogels is a new and promising technology to alleviate the effects of irregular rainfall. Thus, this present project aims to evaluate the application of hydrogels and analyse your possible impacts in soil microbial activity while your biodegradation process. In Bangor, analyses will be carried out with the soil in the laboratory to simulate the field environment and analyze how the biodegradation process of the material will react with the soil microbiota, for this purpose the quantification of carbon dioxide (CO2), mass loss, among other parameters that ascertain biodegradation will be applied and finally analyses to observe changes in microbial activity and its metabolism. The request for an internship abroad at Bangor University seeks to assess how the microbial activity of the soil will be impacted in the presence of hydrogels, thus complementing the training and mainly answering the scientific question of how hydrogels impact the soil microbiota and what possible impacts it can exert on the microbiota during the degradation of the material.