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
Adj
uste
d R
2D
esig
n
0.44
0.46
0.48
0.50
0.52
0.54
0.56
151015202530
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sat
soil
dem
geo
land
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!
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