The soils project has been designed to run in three distinct phases.

• The first phase is to design, implement and analyse data from a national survey. This survey will look at the relationship between soil types and earthworm population distributions, engaging various interest groups and members of the public from all walks of life. The survey is one of 5 national surveys within the OPAL portfolio of projects, each of which is managed by a national centre.
• The second phase is to perform a more focussed programme of research, following analysis of survey data submitted under Phase 1. This data is uploaded to the main OPAL web portal where it is made available to the soil centre for analysis.
• The final Phase (3) is designed to allow us to look more closely at the effect of spreading waste to land.

The project phases are shown in the diagram below.