Thinking Like An Ecosystem
As the first plants are growing our team will advance from starting a system on Mars to managing the systems. Due to the closed system nature, this needs to be Holistic Management. Students will now manage four big ecosystem processes: the Mineral Cycle (recycling nutrients), the Water Cycle (making every drop count), Community Dynamics (getting plants and microbes to work together). And last, but in no way least, the Energy Flow is needed to capture every bit of sunlight and store it in the soil.
To manage a Martian farm holistically, you must treat it not as a collection of individual plants, but as a single, inseparable "living machine" where the soil, biology, and human management function together to achieve a holistic goal. Students will learn this is not the earth where natural processes exist to repair and revitalize the environment. This is Mars a cold barren dry region where all resources need to be managed.
In a holistic sense, the best manner to manage minerals is to move from the "Incomplete" cycle of raw Martian regolith to a "Very complete" cycle, where minerals are consistently recycled through many levels of organisms. Through the process of the unit the student started with raw mineralized Martian regolith but were given seeds which for the purposes of demonstration would come from earth. Water will be one of the main variables as the uncertainty of amounts of water on Mars are not conclusive. The Biogeochemical Engine focuses on humification which is the microbial transformation of plants and microbial litter into humus. So, students will essentially be turning dry dusty sand into a moist sponge capable of sustaining life. Humus acts as the dominant storage component for essential elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Nutrient bioavailability is measured by soil solution, the liquid phase where chemical reactions happen. Management must ensure nutrients are in a bioavailable form rather than locked in unusable solid phases. This brings students back to their initial choice of microbiome for the soil and whether it now needs to be adjusted.
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