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Soil Horizons articles

  1. Recent progress in soil spectroscopy

    Sustainable land management requires reliable information about a wide range of soil properties, but the cost – both financial and in terms of time – of direct measurements for those properties, can be a burden. Proximal sensing technologies can offer an alternative to the reference laboratory metho...

  2. Infiltrometer network

    One of the key soil information requirements for smart agriculture and storm water management is how fast water infiltrates into the soil at various antecedent soil moisture conditions. Infiltration data are the most important factors for estimating run-off of water applied at a known rate.

  3. Enriching S-map soil information

    The S-map NextGen programme is a 5-year MBIE Endeavour funded programme focussed on the science that underpins S-map, New Zealand’s national soil map.

  4. Soil Guideline Values

    Soil guideline value (SGV) is a generic term used to collectively describe different criteria that typically identify concentrations of substances such as nutrients and contaminants in order to manage soil quality.

  5. Editorial - Big Data

    Big Data is a term coined to describe analytics characterised by a stream of extreme V’s – Volume, Variety, Velocity, & Veracity. In simpler terms, this means abnormally large data size; diverse types and forms of data; integration of traditional and real time data and delivering answers in a timely...

  6. Being certain about uncertainty

    The hydraulic properties of soils, such as available water, macroporosity, and field capacity, are needed in many applications, including the management of irrigation, calculations of soil leaching losses, and management of agricultural activities on certain soils, as well as in long-term studies on...

  7. RPAS capabilities

    Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS, otherwise known as drones or UAV) have revolutionised our ability to obtain incredibly fine-scale imagery of the land surface with unprecedented ease, affordability, flexibility, and repeatability. RPAS are now widely used in a professional capacity by resear...

  8. Better soil sampling

    Soil surveys provide essential data for farm environment plans, regional surveys, national inventories, and land use and management decisions. The choice of exactly where sample data is gathered seems, at first sight, to be simple. But the practical problems of planning fieldwork can easily consume ...

  9. Soil legacy data

    Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research and its predecessors can be very proud of a continuous, 90-year history of generating and processing soils information for New Zealand and Pacific territories. Several generations of soil scientists have accumulated an impressive national wealth of soil data, maps,...

  10. Pedometrics

    In the last few decades, technological progress has provided new and improved sensors able to tackle soil complexity and variability, in which diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, in the visible, near- and mid-infrared range (Vis-NIR and MIR), and other proximal soil sensing methods play a pioneering r...

  11. Mapping soil pH in Antarctica

    Antarctica is the most arid continent in the world. A range of extreme environmental conditions – extremely low and fluctuating temperatures, very little water in an accessible form, and high salinity – combine to create a harsh, cold desert environment

  12. Soilscapes for digital soil mapping

    Digital soil mapping is a statistical modelling exercise that relates soil classes or properties to data for environmental factors that affect soil formation, such as topography, climate, parent material, etc. The statistical model is a quantitative representation of soil-landscape rules that identi...

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