C4S

C4S is a platform for predicting soil property values from spectral scans. The C4S Web App is available at https://quarto.org/docs/websites

Supported by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s (DCCEEW) National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge demonstration and development grant and CSIRO A&F with a total investment of $1.8 million we are building digital infrastructure, the CSIRO Soil Spectral Selection System (C4S), to support cost-effective soil carbon measurement capability and soil stock condition and state in general. Improving low cost and accurate soil carbon measurement will support more land managers to participate in carbon farming and contribute to Australia’s legislated commitment to reducing emissions by 43% by 2030 and to net zero by 2050.

Embedded in CSIRO’s Soil Information System (CSIS), CSIRO holds the largest and most spatially and temporally diverse soil spectral library in Australia. C4S (see screenshot of the prototype) will provide users with the option to intelligently leverage the unrealised value of this national asset for their local situation. This includes also transformations for calibration transfer between spectral technologies and for soil attribute predictions in field condition, to better unify disparate existing soil spectral measurements across Australia.

The C4S project is helping to empower the use of soil spectral inference to assess not only soil carbon, but a variety of indicators relating to soil ecosystem service provision, driving down the costs of sampling and laboratory analysis, compared to existing soil monitoring frameworks. C4S is based on a feasibility study conducted under CERC postdoctoral research of Dr James Moloney on Proximal tools for Natural Capital Accounting who found that by tapping into CSIRO’s national soil spectral library asset intelligently to identify the most appropriate resources for a given site, the required amount of laboratory analysis needed to establish the distribution of stocks of soil properties, and importantly, detect changes within them can be halved (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2023.116651).  

Additionally, the C4S project is expanding soil spectral methods trialled under Dr Moloney’s work to new land uses, regions, and farming systems, ensuring coverage and applicability under more challenging scenarios. Alongside new studies, C4S is leveraging the vast array of soils within the CSIRO National Soils Archive to increase spatial carbon information coverage, identifying spectral outliers without existing soil carbon analytical information, further improving the applicability of this national CSIRO asset.

The project team includes people from A&F (Mark Glover, James Moloney, Brendan Malone, Senani Karunaratne, Georgia Reed, Ross Searle, Stuart Spencer, Uta Stockmann, Tom Zhao) and Environment (Aarond Dino) together with external partners The University of Sydney, Hone Carbon and Carbon Link to ensure C4S is fit-for-purpose.