Rooting Concordia is a three-year, student-led research and community infrastructure initiative with two interconnected components. The first is the establishment of the Concordia Collective Seed Library: a free, open-access resource providing locally adapted and heritage seeds, including Abenaki bush bean varieties grown on unceded Abenaki territory, to students, staff, and community members. The library will use a physical Dewey-adapted catalogue co-developed with Paul Blouin and the Vanier Loyola Library team, and a dedicated iPad running a digital sign-out form that collects social science data on gardening habits, seed saving experience, and soil and fertiliser practices. This instrument, designed using a Participatory Action Research framework and Indigenous research methods, ensures that the library generates knowledge for the community as well as from it.
The second component is a multi-site, applied soil health study comparing three amendments: ABCompost vermicompost, BSF exoskeleton frass, and commercially imported compost, across four growing sites spanning urban campus to unceeded rural Abenaki territory. These sites are the Concordia campus plots, Coop CultivAction’s Senneville farm, Le Noyau farm in Stanbridge East, and a controlled environment in Khelifa’s lab. Year 1 measures soil nutrient profiles (NPK, pH, organic matter, microbial life) across all sites. Years 2 and 3 expand to include 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing in collaboration with the CERMO-FC Genomics Platform at UQAM and Docterre, characterizing both soil microbiome and the endophytic microbial communities carried inside the bean seeds themselves before and after harvest. The central research question is whether locally produced amendments reshape not just the soil, but the microbial communities living inside the next generation of seeds.
YEARS FUNDED
2026
AMOUNT ALLOCATED
$3,000