Author: admin
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Adding Organic Matter in Soil has a limited effect on soil’s water holding capacity
Sequestering carbon in the soil via the addition of Organic Matter addition has been widely promoted to contribute to the mitigation of climate change. Enhancing soil organic matter can improve soil quality, i.e., increasing nutrient retention, improvement in soil structure, enhancing soil biotic activity and improvements in soil moisture and temperature regimes. Organic matter addition…
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Digital soil mapping of soil carbon at the farm scale: A spatial downscaling approach
Initiated during 2015, Quentin Styc was a visiting intern student from France to our soil security laboratory for 3 months. I had this idea of spatial downscaling and trying to include observational data into the scheme. Quentin was happy to work on this little problem, and actually presented some preliminary results on this at the…
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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…
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Soil Spectral Inference Workshop
The desire to measure soil carbon and other soil properties rapidly and more cheaply has resulted in soil spectroscopy becoming a hot topic of research in soil science over the past few years. Researchers in the Soil Security Lab in the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Agriculture and Environment have been leading the way in…
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Forging an international research collaboration to secure soils for posterity
Between June 15-19, University of Sydney research fellows Drs. Brendan Malone and Uta Stockmann visited the National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, to provide training and expertise in advanced methods of digital soil mapping. The hands-on and practical course was presented to local researchers, graduate students, and Taiwanese Government scientists, totaling 25 participants. The visit to…