Have you stopped and think about the ground beneath your feet? Leonardo da Vinci said: “We know more about the motion of celestial bodies than we do about the earth beneath our feet.” But our survival as human beings – as well as life on our planet is dependent on the health of the thin layer of soil covering the earth.
Soils provide society with vital nutrients, food, fiber and other raw materials, and is also an important habitat for one quarter of Earth’s biodiversity. Soils also are the biggest organic carbon storage reservoir in the Earth and, despite being extremely dynamic, they are also fragile. Take a forest and it could re-grow within 50 years, however you’ll lose 10 centimeters of soil and be prepared to have to wait for a thousand years until it is back. Without soil, the planet will be a mystery for humans, and even more similar to the impervious and barren planet on Mars or the Moon. Moon as well as Mars.
In the past it was not clear even realize how deep the earth is beneath our feet. As with all mystery, a little digging is needed for soils to be known and their story to be revealed.
Once they’re visible there are a variety of questions that come up. What is the difference in color with the depth indicate? What is the amount of carbon being stored? Are the soils dense, fragile, damaged or in good health? The answer to these questions is crucial however, it is a major problem that could require many years of education.
Online Soil Resources
Researchers who are involved in Open Soil Science technologies and data met last week in the Netherlands to discuss recent as well as future advances in soil science for citizens. With the help of making electronic tools as well as making these free available, we aim to communicate the mysteries of the soil to more people and expand the spread and accessibility of soil data as well as our understanding of soil’s properties around the globe. We can then devise specific strategies to protect this precious resource.
If you’re looking to learn how the earth works that surrounds your home, the SoilGrids system gives you an open and accessible access to a range of soil features and soil varieties. The internet-based World Soil Information Service ( WoSIS) as well as The virtual world Soil Museum give details on a variety of soil profiles across the world featuring high-resolution photos of soil profiles, accompanied by specific explanations of each soil the horizons.
These sites (and they have many others) can be a good beginning point for getting acquainted with soils, in order that both landowners and farmers are aware of the factors that lead to the growth of soils and the way it affects the health of soils and the functioning of ecosystems including carbon storage.
Apps To Help On The Ground
The different users might have different expectations of soil applications. Gardeners and farmers on the farm are usually concerned about soil fertility while educators in the classroom might want to discuss the importance of soils and their role in the vast natural diversity of landscapes around the world.
Whatever the expectations of users regardless of expectations, applications for smartphones as well as websites can assist people to understand the various features and possible uses for soil, thereby highlighting the splendor, variety and significance of this overlooked natural resources.
MySoil is an application, which was developed through the British Geological Survey in 2012 It aims at bringing awareness of the variety of soil characteristics throughout Europe as well as the ability to collect images and information about the soils that surround your. It is designed for non-experts More than 50,000 individuals explore the soils that surround their homes and are providing more than 4000 observations around the world.
Soil Explorer created by ISEE network in 2015 to 2017 displays how soil changes in different ways and what this means. This application provides a frame of understanding, especially those who want to know the ways that soils change with respect to the various climates and landscapes (why does the soil here colored red and grey there? Is my soil more wet than to other soil types?). You can, for instance, look at the regions that were recently affected by Harvey. You can zoom into the areas recently flooded by Hurricane Harvey within Houston, Texas, and find a lot of the affected soils with “recent alluvium” (soil substances which are left behind by the water) which demonstrates the strong relationship between soil properties and floods. This is useful for the making of decisions such as which areas to build homes in case local planning for the area is insufficient or maps aren’t easily accessible. The maps of soil properties can be derived from the precise soil survey records available across the US Seven states are available online, and additional states coming soon.
The app in Scotland, Soil Organic Carbon Information Technology (SOCIT) created in collaboration with James Hutton Institute, was developed by the James Hutton Institute in 2015 utilizes the location of the user and the color of the soil in order to calculate the level of organic matter present in the topsoil. The app (available on Android as well as Apple) will shortly expand its coverage to include the UK as well as Europe. Organic carbon in soil is the primary indicator of fertility in soils and the soils are home to greater amounts of carbon than the vegetation and the atmosphere together and therefore, soil carbon storage, and understanding how to guard it is crucial to overall health of the ecosystem and consequently all of us.
LandPKS ( Land Potential Knowledge System) is designed to enhance the data available to land managers in making the decisions regarding efficiency and sustainability. It helps users navigate the open data on climate and soil to offer free, simple to utilize, local data to help optimize management of land decision-making. The program was created in Kenya as well as Namibia and is now being trialled in Tanzania in addition to in the United States.
Then What’s The Use In All That Numbers?
The vast amount of soil information raises the question, what’s useful for? A quick and immediate application for global accessible soil data is to determine the crops that can be grown in which areas. CropBASE will accomplish this, through the combination of climate, soil and data from crowdsourced sources to address the ‘what’, where’ and ‘when’ issues which we’ll have to answer for the future of agriculture.
There are a myriad of websites and applications accessible to dig into the soil’s treasures. It is our hope that by drawing attention to the importance and complexity of soils using modern technology, it will help raise awareness on the significance of soil health throughout the globe. This can help reveal the vast diversity of soils in different locations and give fundamental knowledge to evaluate soil characteristics.
Because of modern technologies making it possible to unlock the secrets of soils is now simpler.
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