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Digital Soil Mapping Training in Jeonju, Korea
Brendan Malone and Budiman Minasny recently conducted a 2-day digital soil mapping training at the Rural Development Agency (RDA) Headquarter in JeonJu, S. Korea, 17-18 October 2017. The training is part o fthe research collaboration between National Institute of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Sydney. It is also supported by the Australia Korea Foundation….
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More Data or a Better Model?
A new paper published in Soil Science Society of America Journal by Sanjeewani Nimalka Somarathna Pallegedara Dewage as part of her PhD tried to answer this question by figuring out what matters most for DSM of soil carbon. In this study, Sanjee studied how diverse spatial modelling techniques perform under varying training sample sizes, in…
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Mount Agung: Light will shine out of darkness
By: Dian Fiantis and Budiman Minasny Bali’s Mount Agung is likely to erupt soon. This eruption will be a catastrophic event, lava and ashes with high temperatures will be ejected causing severe risk to humans and their livelihoods. Ashes from the volcano will cause damages to farmers, destructing their crops and burying their farms. The…
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Adding Organic Matter in Soil has a limited effect on soil’s water holding capacity
Sequestering carbon in the soil via the addition of Organic Matter addition has been widely promoted to contribute to the mitigation of climate change. Enhancing soil organic matter can improve soil quality, i.e., increasing nutrient retention, improvement in soil structure, enhancing soil biotic activity and improvements in soil moisture and temperature regimes. Organic matter addition…
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Digital soil mapping of soil carbon at the farm scale: A spatial downscaling approach
Initiated during 2015, Quentin Styc was a visiting intern student from France to our soil security laboratory for 3 months. I had this idea of spatial downscaling and trying to include observational data into the scheme. Quentin was happy to work on this little problem, and actually presented some preliminary results on this at the…
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Geochemical fingerprinting of volcanic soils used for wetland rice in West Sumatra, Indonesia
Toward the end of 2016, Prof. Dian Fiantis (Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Universitas Andalas, Kampus Limau Manis) spent around 3 months in our soil science research group. With her in her kit bag, were a number of soil samples collected from various sites around a few different volcanoes situated in West Sumatra,…