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Geochemical fingerprinting of volcanic soils used for wetland rice in West Sumatra, Indonesia
Toward the end of 2016, Prof. Dian Fiantis (Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Universitas Andalas, Kampus Limau Manis) spent around 3 months in our soil science research group. With her in her kit bag, were a number of soil samples collected from various sites around a few different volcanoes situated in West Sumatra,…
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Rapid assessment of petroleum-contaminated soils with infrared spectroscopy
This is the first paper from our new PhD student in the Soil Security Laboratory, Wartini Ng. Soil sensing using infrared spectroscopy has been proposed as an alternative to conventional soil analysis to detect soil contamination. This study evaluated the use of field portable and laboratory bench top infrared spectrometers in both the near infrared (NIR)…
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Brendan Malone talks about DSM with R
What led up to this DSM “cookbook”? Things really kicked off in 2010 when I was invited with Budiman and Alex to prepare a digital soil mapping training course to a number of Australian government scientists and soil scientists. Digital soil mapping was becoming operationalised in Australia around this time with initiatives such as the…
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Dominique Arrouays talks about 4 per mille
What is Soil carbon 4 per mille initiative? The 4 per mille (or 4 per 1000) initiative was launched during the COP21 meeting in Paris by The French Minister of Agriculture, Stéphane Le Foll. This initiative aspires to increase the global soil organic carbon stocks by 0.4 percent per year as a compensation for the…
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ACLEP Digital Soil Mapping Training
Digital soil mapping (DSM) involves a range of innovative software and modelling approaches to develop relationships between soil classes and individual properties and a number of environmental covariates. These relationships can then be used to predict the spatial pattern of soil classes and properties across the landscape. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program (ACLEP) arranged…
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Soil spectral inference workshop at RDA, Korea
I requested Dr. Budiman Minasny to conduct the soil spectral inference workshop at RDA National Academy of Agricultural Science, Suwon in February 2013. RDA has a laboratory with near infrared spectroscopy for measuring soil reflectance. However its use is not optimized because the processing of the spectral data require advanced statistical analysis. Dr. Minasny has…