Science Wednesday: federating soil spectra

Today’s short video presentation by Brendan Malone comes from Digiscape’s work to construct a Soil Spectral Platform: findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable analytics for converting measured soil spectra into actionable information. Brendan presents one portion of a larger technology: an algorithm for bringing spectra measured with different instruments together into a coherent, or standardised, dataset.

Brendan isn’t doing federation of data in the classic sense, but he is showing a solution to a common problem in digital agriculture and environmental science: data that are collected via a fragmented process and then stay salient for longer than the data-collection technology stays current.

Agritech focuses on the new and exciting: but without the shelves of soil samples curated by the National Soil Archive over decades, this science would not have been feasible.