Become a soil scientist and tell the world how awesome soil is

My journey into the underworld

I’m a pedologist (a rare species these days).  My research focuses on 21^st century soil mapping by combining muddy boots soil survey (digging holes) and digital soil mapping  (reproducing soil maps using models). I am fascinated to explore how we can replicate the mental models that the surveyors used to understand how soils change in two and three dimensions in the landscape by applying learning algorithms or classifiers to environmental data. After high school I made the decision of science over art. After 10 years in academia as an undergraduate and postgraduate in environmental science, geography and geophysics I only really ‘found’ soils when I started working at Cranfield University. I had some fabulous mentors (now sadly retired) who were the former soil survey staff of England and Wales. These guys are amazing. They spent many years in the field deciphering the soil landscape and collecting the soils data that was subsequently used to produce the soil maps that we now have in the UK, some of them now available at your fingertips as apps (SoilWeb for US data, Soilscapes for UK data) on your smartphone. These guys made me a soil nerd.  

#girlswithtoys: soil data and digital soil mapping

I’m a soil nerd but why isn’t everyone else? Let’s face it soil science has a bit of an image problem. Dirt. Mud. Muck. And we don’t have dinosaurs or rockets to illustrate our science but there is so much cool technology that is used to investigate soils. In digital soil mapping we use all sorts of mapped environmental data. This includes data collected from satellites that identify vegetation responses or the land surface (terrain), some of the factors that give rise to differences in soils in one part of the landscape to another. At the farm level field soil and crop data is collected using a variety of sensors that can collect data ‘on-the-go’ off the back of a tractor or by capturing images from the air using UAVs. How cool is that?  The soil maps that are created using this data combined with digital soil mapping techniques are predictions. Although the models will give us some idea of the uncertainty of the predictions we still need to verify then with observations and direct measurement of soil properties. So even with all this technology we still need some experts getting their boots muddy and their opinions can also be incorporated into some of the models we use.