Facing the Future Turbo Talk - 26-27th May 2015

Editor's Notes

• #3: Improving the accuracy = aggregate out many sources of information/iron out any discrepancies and inconsistencies using developed modelling approaches. – Scotland, England and Wales using datasets from The James Hutton Institute and Cranfield University (NSRI). National Soils data – physical, chemical, biological and morphological data – properties such as soil carbon, chemistry etc.
• #4: 2015 is the International Year of Soils and as part of the year we are having a whole host of events to advertise the importance of soils for plants, animals and humans. The IYS aims to increase awareness and understanding of the importance of soil for food security and other essential functions. Did you know, though, that an acre of soil can hold about 5-10 tons of living beings? One measly gram of soil could hold as much as 5,000-7,000 different bacteria species
• #5: Soils deliver an array of ecosystems services that enable life on earth. These range from carbon sequestration, flood regulation and habitat for organisms – important for everybody and everything! The ones that have a blue circle around them are the ones that are strictly connected to the main themes of the conference we are all attending. That’s not to say that the other functions are no more or less important.
• #6: There are different types of soil information out there ranging from maps, data and apps which can showcase soil properties such as soil carbon, morphology and soil types. Examples of this are Land Information System (LandIS) at Cranfield University and Soils Information for Scottish Soils (SIFSS) at the James Hutton Institute. The UK Soil Observatory (UKSO) is also holding a lot of the soils data and information for a wide variety of research institutes such as Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and the British Geological Survey (BGS). Soil information can be used by a range of different stakeholders (the majority sectors are listed on this slide) for an array of projects and applications. Construction industry need soils information to assess suitability for building infrastructure. Authorities such as DEFRA, Environmental Agencies need soils information to assess things such as flood risk, leaching risk etc. Availability of information which is up-to-date is a problem as traditional soil surveying is nowadays deemed to be too expensive, impractical and time consuming. Furthermore, a lot of information that the stakeholder might be needing might not be at the appropriate scale or resolution. This can and has caused problems in terms of shaping policies and management decisions.
• #7: There is useful soil information which can be communicated in different ways (through work in laboratories and archives) – through digitally creating soil maps to transferring this information onto apps such as the SOCiT app which was designed by Matt Aitkenhead and others at Hutton.
• #8: Start off with our covariates which are based on SCORPAN model which was first coined by McBratney and authors in 2003. The data is then cleansed to iron out any inconsistencies within the data (e.g. negative values) Data is then analysed to see if there are any potential relationships within the data – Statistica programme is the main programme that uses this. These are then shoved into an inference model such as a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) as the one in the diagram (also have Neural Networks, CART and RF)- from these analyses we can then generate a map of the outputs from the model. –this is an example of a map output used as part of Africa Soils project.
• #9: Throughout the literature, we are beginning to move towards digital soil assessment. The green box above show the information we have a lot of. Cranfield and Hutton host a lot of soil observations on which we have information on soil properties, soil classes and the like. We also have an extensive range of external environmental (or covariate) data. The box in blue below shows information that we need to explore further. Soil functions and soil threats in particular are of key interest. This will then help us to give us information on potential scenario issues or risks that might occur which could affect market/society, environment and shape policies and management. The red circle is just to indicate what hopefully through Digital Soil Mapping of simple soil functions (in the initial sense) I’ll be able to achieve as part of my PhD (HOPEFULLY!!)