C4S
CSIRO holds the largest and most spatially and temporally diverse soil spectral library in Australia with a total of over 40,000 records representative of the nation’s soil types. The CSIRO Soil Spectral Selection System (C4S) is an App platform that is making these national visible and infra-red soil spectral data accessible and useful and is built on decades of CSIRO’s research in soil spectroscopy. Soil spectroscopy is a technology that measures the spectral signature of a soil sample. This signature is collected from reflected light in the visible and infra-red part of the electromagnetic spectrum. From this one signature or soil spectral measurement a range of soil chemical, physical and biological soil properties can be estimated, which enables rapid and cost-effective soil assessments.
The C4S App provides users with the option to intelligently leverage CSIRO’s national spectral library asset for their local situation. This includes also transformations for calibration transfer between spectral technologies and for soil attribute predictions in field and laboratory condition, to better unify disparate existing soil spectral measurements across Australia. The C4S digital infrastructure will support cost-effective soil organic carbon (SOC) measurement capability and soil condition and health in general.
The C4S App development has been supported by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s (DCCEEW) National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge (NSCIC) Development and Demonstration Grant and CSIRO Agriculture and Food. The $50 million DCCEEW NSCIC Program sought to encourage industry and researchers to develop lower-cost, accurate technological solutions for SOC measurement. Improving low cost and accurate SOC 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. Innovation and increased accessibility of SOC measurement enables improved understanding of where and how land management can improve SOC levels. The objectives of the Program were to:
Fast-track the development of lower-cost, accurate technical approaches to enable land managers to quantify the impact of their land management activities on SOC.
Secure co-investment and foster partnerships that trial and deploy novel SOC measurement technological solutions.
The C4S App functionality is based on CSIRO’s decades of soil spectroscopy research together with research conducted under the DCCEEW NSCIC feasibility study and the CSIRO ResearchPlus Early Career Postdoctoral Fellowship project Proximal tools for Natural Capital Accounting (Moloney et al. 2023; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2023.116651). This research found that by tapping into CSIRO’s national soil spectral library asset intelligently to identify the most appropriate resources for a local site, the required amount of laboratory analysis can be halved when establishing a local soil spectral library to estimate the distribution of stocks of soil properties.
The C4S App was built by a multi-disciplinary team including research and computer scientists, and database developers from CSIRO Agriculture and Food, Environment and IM&T, together with feedback from external partners The University of Sydney, Hone Ag and Carbon Link to ensure C4S is fit-for-purpose.
The C4S Web App is available at https://quarto.org/docs/websites.