The Soil Animal Days 2017

For the third year running, NIOO is organising the national Soil Animal Days, together with a number of partners including Wageningen UR. Read on for the latest, and to find out what YOU can do to help...

Kicking off on World Animal Day (4 October), the annual Soil Animal Days are aimed at generating more attention for the soil and everything that lives in it: for what important 'services' do we depend on soil organisms? And how can we make people more aware of how indispensable the life under our feet really is?

With a revamped and expanded website at www.bodemdierendagen.nl, we're asking as many members of the public as possible to go out and look for soil animals in their garden, local park or schoolyard. And yes, that includes you (NB. For now, the online form and the website are only in Dutch)!

Also, watch out for tweets and posts about the Soil Animal Days on our social media, and for some familiar NIOO faces and voices on tv, radio and elsewhere:

• This evening (Friday 6 October) at 18:30, Ciska Veen and her backyard (!) will feature on Hallo Vandaag, the daily news & human interest programma broadcast by Omroep Max on NPO 2: https://www.maxvandaag.nl/programmas/tv/hallo-nederland/hallo-nederland/POW_03563969/
• Gerard Korthals - one of the organisers - did a TV talk show at the regional broadcaster RTV Utrecht (at the start and from about 5:08 min.)
• And check out the short video that tv-gardener Lodewijk Hoekstra from NL Greenlabel made especially for us. It's below (in Dutch) and on our Facebook feed. So share it if you can!

The deadline for sending in Soil Animal observations is Tuesday 10 October at 09:00. So...please send in your own observations and tell everybody you know about the Soil Animal Days.

The more results we get, the more scientifically useful they will be!