• soilspec4gg@woodwellclimate.org
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Objectives

Today’s data-driven agriculture, climate science, and land management need high-resolution soil data across space and time. Soil spectroscopy can help fill this gap. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is becoming an indispensable tool in soil science, but technical challenges still limit its routine use outside research projects. These include instrument differences, model transferability, uncertainty, and access to large calibration libraries.

SS4GG pursues two overarching goals:

  1. Grow a collaborative network. Accelerate scientific discovery in soil spectroscopy by connecting and supporting an international community of researchers and practitioners.
  2. Provide open, global infrastructure. Maintain and improve an open, web-accessible platform for predicting soil properties from spectra collected on different instruments anywhere in the world.

What we’ve delivered

  • The Open Soil Spectral Library (OSSL): a public, growing compilation of 20 independent soil spectral libraries, harmonized into a common format. It covers VisNIR, NIR, and MIR spectra from national, continental, and global collections and is described in a peer-reviewed, open-access PLOS One paper (2025).
  • Open prediction models: calibrated models for many soil properties, distributed openly (via the OSSL Engine) and reproducible locally through a containerized Nix environment.
  • Web services: the OSSL Explorer, the OSSL Engine for uploading and predicting from your own spectra, and a no-server, web-browser tool for exploratory chemometric modeling.
  • Open code and training: reproducible GitHub repositories, the OSSL manual, hands-on tutorials, a predictive soil spectroscopy training guide, and community Kaggle competitions.
  • A handheld NIR library: a dedicated Neospectra dataset built from about 2,000 KSSL archive samples. Each sample was scanned on multiple instruments to capture instrument-to-instrument variability.
  • A Community on Zenodo: publicly archiving the OSSL and new datasets produced by our team. We welcome your contributions!
  • Ring Trial network: Soil standards shared around the world for interlaboratory comparison and spectral standardization.

Where we’re going

  • Grow the network through new collaborative research built on the OSSL.
  • Expand the OSSL with new contributed libraries, especially from under-represented regions.
  • Improve harmonization and calibration transfer across instruments and geographic regions, including portable field scanners.
  • Strengthen uncertainty estimation so predictions can be trusted for real-world decision-making.
  • Support applications in soil carbon, soil health, and soil monitoring.
  • Advance community standards with partners such as the IEEE P4005 working group.

Interested in contributing data or joining the network? Contact us or fill out this form.