Susana Valle, an Agronomist by profession, currently works as Director of the Master’s in Soil Sciences at the Universidad Austral de Chile for 3 years. Although she began working in the program approximately 9 years ago as a teacher, directing it has made it grow and define new challenges, including the training of specialists in Soil Sciences.
“I was not at all associated with the agronomic labor field, I lived in the city without any relationship with the countryside or associates” mentions Susana, however, her interest in Soil Sciences was born in classes thanks to a subject called Edaphology, which is what she currently He teaches at the UACh “a world opened up to me, I had no idea that this world of soils existed and that’s when I started to like it.”
After graduating and having done a postgraduate course on soil-plant relationship, the academic detected the need in our country to train professionals in the specialized field of soils, since there is still a lot of ignorance, bad practices and lack of regulations associated with soils. , due to the same ignorance of the population in general of what these mean, “that motivates me to improve and maintain the resource for future generations, since finally the soils are in charge of supplying food to the entire population, that is to say , we must highlight the importance of the resource, something as trivial as we feed at least three times a day, without soil, it would not be possible to satisfy this basic need, which is one of the many ecosystem functions of soils”.
Susana completed her doctorate at the Universidad Austral de Chile and in this she highlights that the training provided by her academics marked her “at that time who were my professors marked my experience in terms of teaching and research quality and I believe that this is tremendously important , when one is also training people in the postgraduate course, trying to convey the same thing, at least I consider that I was lucky since I had a very good training and excellent good references”.
In addition, he points out that he had had the privilege of knowing a lot about the soils of our country, fundamentally the soils of the southern Patagonian zone, “I think I have done some of the most detailed soil studies in the Aysén and Magallanes Region and here obviously in the Los Ríos Region, Los Lagos and I feel that I know a lot about the soils of the southern and central zone of the country. For the same reason, I believe that there is a gap in specialized training for soil science professionals”.
As a result of this, today its field of work is soil quality and soil formation, understanding quality as the ecosystem functioning of soils, -since these fulfill multiple functions- and their evaluation. Fundamentally focused on soils of volcanic origin, particular soils worldwide, since they cover less than 1% of the world and in Chile we have more than 60% of the productive surface in terms of forestry and agriculture of volcanic origin, “andThis makes us unique worldwide, that is why we exploit this area and study the particularity of this type of soil and its functionality and quality, so I focus on the evaluation of quality and search for indicators under different conditions of use of the soil. soil and my lines of research are in this area”.
Projects and research
Among the activities that Susana carries out in the UACh Master’s program, in addition to managing its administrative issues, she highlights the participation in courses and sponsorship of students and their research, “awarding projects to me gives you a a little more confidence and also the support to be able to carry out research and postgraduate training with students, which is what one wants, to be able to finance their thesis projects”
Currently, the academic is in the second year of a Fondecyt Regular project that seeks to generate quality indices for volcanic soils in the southern macro zone, considering from the Araucanía Region to the Aysén Region. The idea of this project is to be able to present the results as quantitative evidence that there are land use managements that favor or do not favor its functions. Evidence so that those who make decisions associated with the field of soils, such as legislators or those who allocate resources, can have these tools to make decisions with more knowledge in the area of soils and that allow themselves to evaluate what is being done today, evidencing whether this improves or worsens the functionality of soils. “For me, this is a great achievement that I am developing, in addition to participating as alternate director of a project that will also generate quality and fragility indices of soils in the Los Ríos region and the Aysén Region, and the ability to visit both regions in a very finished shape is a great achievement”.
