The roles are  soil functions, soil services and threats to soil.  There are eight functions, seven  roles and eight threats. Likely soil indicators for assessing the roles for capacity and condition are discussed. Those which can be estimated accurately and with time and economic efficiency by spectroscopic methods, principally mid infrared red reflectance (MIR) spectroscopy, are discussed in more detail. This process is aided by a soil inference system, Soil spectroscopy, particularly MIR, facilitates an efficient methodology of simultaneously estimating a wide range of soil indicators for soil capacity and condition for many specific soil roles; thus providing an invaluable contribution to overall soil security assessment.

Speakers:

• Prof. Alex McBratney 
• Dr. Sandra Evangelista.

The University of Sydney