UC2 SOIL HEALTH AND ROOT PHENOTYPING

Innovative, automatable soil imaging techniques to determine key belowground parameters in real time at plot to landscape scale

Partners: BOKU (Lead), UPorto, S4ML

Objective

The UC will deliver an innovative approach for the in situ quantification of soil physico-chemical and root properties, which are often missing in agricultural and ecological applications or surveyed at coarse resolutions.

It will utilize portable, high-performance near infrared (NIR) instruments, increasingly established as a rapid and cost-efficient laboratory technique, taking the technique from the laboratory to the field for fast, automatable on-site surveys of key soil parameters such as soil organic carbon (Figure X). Specifically, the UC will:

• Determine dependency of calibrations (on ground truthing data) on soil type, texture, moisture & rooting densities.
  
  
• Develop analysis pipelines and a User Interface for use in RI.
  
  
• Relate surface measured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and deep soil C pattern for upscaling soluble organic compounds (SOC) at landscape levels and define sampling strategies (probe insertion, and ground truthing) for heterogeneous landscapes.
  
  
• Link ex situ soil spectral libraries to in situ spectra.
  
  
• Develop ontology, data format, (European) ex situ spectral library.
  
  
• Train-the-trainer courses for a wide adoption of the techniques.

Expected results and services