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Can Lidar measure peat extent and thickness?
The answer is obviously not, but many in Indonesia were convinced that Lidar is the method for measuring peat extent and thickness. Where does this come from? Lidar, particularly used in airborne mapping, can be used to create a 3-D earth’s surface model. Laser pulses reflect objects both on and above the ground surface, thus…
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Digital mapping of peatland in West Sumatra
Prof. Dian Fiantis from Universitas Andalas collaborate with us (remotely) to map peatland in West Sumatra, an oil palm plantation with an area about 40,000 hectares. We helped designed the sampling locations by a stratified random approach. Students studied in the Soil Survey Course at Andalas were allocated to groups or zones. They located the…
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Proximal Soil Sensing from a long way away, and a long time ago
Lunokhod 1 (Луноход, moon walker in Russian) was the first astro-remote-controlled rovers landed on the Moon by the USSR. It was carried to the moon by the Luna 17 spacecraft, landed on November 17, 1970 in the northwestern part of Mare Imbrium, and operated until September 29, 1971. Lunokhod 1 is an eight-wheel rover with…
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Soil temperature increase in Australia for the past 50 years
Can historical soil temperature data tell us about climate change? Of course Yes, it all began when we visited the Cowra Agricultural Research station and Brian Murphy showed us the soil temperature data from a depth of 1.8 m which was collected daily since 1942. The data show a gradual increase in soil temperature over…
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Best paper 2016: Farm-scale soil carbon auditing
Our paper Farm-scale soil carbon auditing authored by Jaap deGruijter, Alex McBratney, Budiman Minasny, Ichsani Wheeler, brendan Malone and Uta Stockmann was recently voted as Best Paper in Geoderma. The paper available here was published in the March issue of Geoderma. The idea of the paper was borne out of an ARC Linkage project in…
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Open digital mapping for assessing carbon storage in tropical peatlands
Researchers from Sydney, Australia, and Bogor, Indonesia demonstrate that tropical peatland can be mapped accurately and cost effectively using freely-available remote sensing data and open source software. At COP23 in Bonn, the Global Peatlands Initiative and various organisations held events aiming to bring peatlands on the agenda at COP23. Peatlands have an important role in…