Objectives

Today’s data-driven agriculture demands access to high-resolution spatial and temporal soil data streams. Soil spectroscopy can help fill this data gap. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is becoming an indispensable tool in soil science; however, several technical challenges still limit its broader application outside of research projects.

SoilSpec4GG is a USDA-funded Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools Coordinated Innovation Network with two overarching goals:

Accelerate the pace of scientific discovery in soil spectroscopy by facilitating and supporting a collaborative network of researchers.
Develop an advanced yet intuitive, open source, web-hosted platform to predict various soil properties from MIR spectra collected on any spectrometer anywhere in the world.

Interested in joining the network? Please fill out this form.

This project will bring together soil scientists, spectroscopists, informaticians, data scientists and software engineers to overcome some of the current bottlenecks preventing wider and more efficient use of soil spectroscopy.

A series of working groups will be formed to address topics including calibration transfer, model choice, outreach & demonstration, and use of spectroscopy to inform global carbon cycle modeling.
The network will create open source software to quality check, harmonize and standardize spectra and soil data collections.
The network will deliver a web-based software platform, The Open Soil Spectroscopy Library (OSSL), backed by large spectral databases and robust statistical models, which derives soil properties from the spectral data.
Demonstration, outreach and educational activities will promote the use of the Open Soil Spectral Library and data-driven science to help fill the soil data gap.

Community data science competition results

Spectroscopy on Kaggle

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