Broadening the Reach of Soil Information - the Australian Soil and Landscape Grid.

The soil provides a range of ecosystem services directly – and through the major biochemical cycles is integral to the carbon and nutrient fluxes of all ecosystems.  Soil spatial knowledge is essential to the understanding of ecosystem processes, responses and resilience at the site and paddock – and to the capacity to generalise that understanding across the landscape.   Australian soils are often old, deeply weathered and highly variable; and the current spatial information which describes them is highly variable in quality and coverage.  Understanding the spatial, temporal and process dynamics of the soil has rarely been as necessary as at present.  For example, Australia now has a price on carbon – bringing a key soil cyclical process directly into the economic domain.  As a result, the GlobalSoilMap prescription for a fine resolution, comprehensive, consistent and functional soil map has been recognised as essential information infrastructure for the country. 

The Australian soil and landscape grid is estimating the core GlobalSoilMap attributes – with some essential additions.  The additions include Total Phosphorus through the soil profile (a strong explanatory variable for ecosystem diversity), a focus on the depth and attributes of weathered saprolite, functional landscape descriptors and a set of inferred parameters required for the key paddock, catchment and national simulation models.  Planned connections with the remote sensing community will lead to additional parameters to support model-data assimilation. 

Legacy soil data in Australia vary remarkably in scale, extent and quality – and there are significant areas where the traditional soil mapping has soil and landscape knowledge not captured by site data or by the mapped soil complexes.  This project combines existing soils data (especially that captured in the common data framework of the Australian Soil Resource Information System (ASRIS)), developments in digital soil mapping and accompanying ICT improvements, and spatial statistics to provide the best possible estimates of the key soil functional attributes at a scale important in ecosystem processes and landscape management.  New proximal soil sensing and measurement techniques, enhanced geophysical data (gamma radiometric spectroscopy) and fine scale shuttle radar digital elevation data are integral to this estimation process. The substantial variation in past effort and map / site quality is recognised in the final map grid through specifying the uncertainty of the estimates. The project is also developing a new information systems design connected to the developing national information infrastructure. 

The new grid is being assembled by a team made up of scientists from across the soil information research and development community and the key agencies and institutions.  The grid will integrate with the Australian Soil Resource Information System and through that system to the information systems used by each soil agency.  With projected new investments in digital soil mapping around the country thus connected to the full integrated system, the grid will evolve in quality and utility.