ISRIC's Fruitful Meeting18-Nov-2014

Alessandro Samuel RosaGuest Researcher

Report of activitiesJan-Dec 2014

Science without Borders

● Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)

● Supervisors– Dr. Lúcia Anjos – Universidade Federal

Rural do Rio de Janeiro

– Dr. Gustavo Vasques – Embrapa Solos

– Dr. Gerard Heuvelink – ISRIC

Was this year fruitful?

The original plan

● PhD research project● GSIF project

– WOSIS and World Soil Profiles

– GSIF R-package

– documentation

● Universal Soil Classification System– Tropical Soils

The original plan

● Evaluate the main sources of uncertainty in DSM– CHAPTER I. How much uncertainty reduction is achieved

when more detailed environmental covariates are used?

– CHAPTER II. How do calibration sample size and sampling design affect model composition and prediction accuracy?

– CHAPTER III. How strongly correlated are environmental covariates? Is prediction accuracy improved when they are transformed to their principal components?

– CHAPTER IV

I was not prepared for...

● Changing some aspects of the project● Programming and packaging● Discussing about authorship● Waiting for the feedback of the co-authors● Working with three active co-authors● Summer break

Contributions

● SoilGrids1km: quality checks, cross-validation, publicity (Brazil)

● WOSIS: quality checks, duplicates● SoilInfo App, Spring School: publicity (Brazil)● Universal Soil Classification: Erika Michéli,

Hungary, Brazilian soil data● WRB: Peter Schad, new qualifier (iron),

Brazilian soil data at ISRIC

Events and publications

● WCSS: new qualifier for the WRB (iron)● WCSS: formalizing free survey (psycology)● EGU: quality of freely available covariates● geoENV: formalizing free survey (statistics)● PlosOne: SoilGrids1km

Events and publications

● The Santa Maria dataset, reviewed by Ad

– Metadata● R-package pedometrics

– Plotting– Stewise regression– Spatial simulated annealing

● Geoderma: paper under review

Do more detailed environmental covariates deliver more accurate soil maps?

● Environmental covariates● Some results for soil organic carbon● Main conclusions

SOC model ranking

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0.52

0.54

0.56

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Do more detailed environmental covariates deliver more accurate soil maps?

● Modest increase in the accuracy of linear models● Benefit depends on soil property and other

covariates● Decision based on:

– Relation between covariate and soil property– How much more detailed?– Budget + Knowledge

● More soil observations?

Meetings, Talks, Discussions

● The great ISRIC family (Gerard, Tom, Thomas, Bas, Jorge, Eloi, Maria, Marcos, Luc, Ad, Niels)

● Dick Brus and Jaap de Gruijter, Wageningen● Nicolas Saby and Dominique Arrouays, France● Hannes Reuter, Luca Montanarella, Erika Michéli,

Vince Láng, Tom Vanwalleghem● Murray Lark and Richard Webster, England● ...

Was this year fruitful?

● From my perspective:– Yes, this year was very fruitful!

● From ISRIC's perspective:– PhD student as a guest researcher

– Not many short term concrete benefits

– Long term project, future collaboration

My future

● 2015 – Embrapa Solos– September: Pedometrics (Spain) + ISRIC

● PhD defence – February 2016● ???

ISRIC's future (my suggestions)

● Popularization: Spring School, Ambassadors● WOSIS + WorldSoilProfiles

– Harmonization, Regional experts, Offline, SoilInfo App

● GlobalSoilMap & GSP– ISRIC is the world soil data centre!!!

● Universal Soil Classification (harmonization)● Soil (micro)biology● A kitchen

Many thanks for everything!