With World Soil Day having occured on Monday, the Terrestrial Environment Research Network (TERN) has announced that it will fund a new soil mapping facility for Australia.
The facility, known as the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia, is a collaboration between CSIRO, state and territory agencies, Geoscience Australia and the University of Sydney. It will produce a comprehensive fine-scale grid of functional soil attributes and key landscape features. This is essential information for modelling and managing Australian landscapes and ecosystems, but is not currently available.
Ecosystem research capability will be enhanced through an immediate improvement in the capacity to extrapolate from existing plots/sites, to effectively place new plots, and to design more effective landscape-scale research. The grid is consistent with the developing Global Soils Map and with the evolution in Australian soil information over the past decade.
With completion of the facility, Australian soils information will be consistent, readily available, comprehensive and relevant to current and developing modelling processes, and uncertainty estimates will make clear where there is need for more survey effort.
The Soil and Landscape Grid is a two stage facility – both stages are necessary to meet the needs identified for the Soils Facility. The first stage uses currently available funding to establish the baseline for the facility and the first estimation of the key features of the soils grid. This will be achieved by using a combination of the existing soils data (especially that captured in the common data framework of the Australian Soil Resource Information System (ASRIS)); developments in new soil measurement techniques and proximal soil sensing, digital soil mapping and accompanying information and communication technology (ICT) improvements; and spatial statistics to provide the best possible estimates of the key soil functional attributes at a scale important in ecosystem processes.
Stage 2 will capture a much wider set of source data, will broaden the attributes estimated, will reduce and categorise the uncertainty of the estimates, and substantially improve the access to and ease of use of the facility.
More information is available at http://www.tern.org.au/Soils-and-Landscape-Grid-of-Australia-pg17731.html
