Dear Community,
The core team at Soil Spectroscopy for the Global Good initiative has been quietly working away and we’re pleased to share some updates.
OSSL Publication
Our peer-reviewed and open-access paper on the OSSL is officially published. We encourage you to cite this publication when utilizing the OSSL in your research. We extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who contributed to and provided feedback on the OSSL.
Handheld NIR Scanner Project
We collaborated with multiple institutions to build a NIR dry spectral library. This library used a diverse set of 2,000 samples from the USDA NRCS KSSL Soil Archive, representing much of the mineral soil diversity found in the CONUS. Each sample was scanned multiple times by multiple Si-Ware Neospectra scanners to capture instrument-to-instrument variability. Details on the development of this database are available in this Data in Brief publication. An application of this database to field-scale soil organic carbon stock estimation has been published in the European Journal of Soil Science. The database is free and fully accessible via the OSSL.
OSSL Manual
We’ve also revamped the OSSL Manual, which is now hosted on its official website: https://docs.soilspectroscopy.org/. The manual includes detailed information about soil spectroscopy, open data access, software, models, and tutorials.
Streamlined Data Access
Accessing the OSSL is now easier than ever:
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- Python: Utilize the SoilSpecData package (Thank you, Franck Albinet!).
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- R: We recommend the `qs` package for directly pulling data from Google Cloud Storage.
Reproducible Models with Nix
In response to user feedback, OSSL models can now be run locally using a containerized environment built on Nix, a reproducible package manager. This ensures model reproducibility amidst software updates. The ossl-nix GitHub repository provides a Nix building specification and tutorial for running OSSL models v1.2 (trained in 2023).
Funding Initiatives
We’ve recently submitted two proposals to try to secure a new round of funding to keep these open resources up and running and to develop new ideas with the help of our network. We will keep you updated on our progress.
Stay Connected
Follow us on LinkedIn and X for network activity updates and advancements in the field.
Best regards,
SS4GG team
