Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as reaching zero hunger, food security and sustainable agriculture, recall that there are huge issues in which soils play one of the most important roles in the environment. Soil is a vital natural resource and is characterized by complex patterns which are the result of the interplay of many different factors, constituents, phases, processes, and the interaction of biologic, geological and hydrological compartments over time. In addition to this, human impacts and climate change contribute to make things even more complex.
There is an urgent need for tools based on metrics, information and statistics that can facilitate the transferability and communication of soil complexity and of complex patterns to different kinds of end users.
This session focuses on advances in information technologies such as web tools that publish data, metrics and statistics on soil and earth critical zone or assist their production with the special emphasis of supporting the decision making.
Specifically, this session would provide a general perspective to discuss all the aspect related to the following topics:
• Big geospatial data in earth science and software/tools to manage them.
• Web-enabled tools and methods about metrics and statistics applied to soil and earth critical zone data.
• Deployment of WebGIS for publication/sharing of soil (the Soil Inference Systems, SIS) and earth critical zone data and their derivatives also thanks to the different OGC-compliant web (mapping, feature, coverage, …) services.
• Models and tools addressing procedures and analysis on soil and earth critical zone data that are shared over the web using standard web services (such as the OGC web processing service).
• Simple technologies and sensors that can interact with soils and the earth critical zone in the context of the Internet of Things, e.g. a phone photo can enter an on-line database to get an insight about a soil feature such as the organic carbon content in real time, and so on.
• Presentation of models (or of tools that aid the development of models) which are embedded (or are susceptible of being embedded) in on-line platforms such as geospatial cyber-infrastructures in order to use soil and earth critical zone data and derivatives in a dynamic fashion to enhance land management and planning.
• Web based geospatial decision support systems embedding soils and earth critical zone in a dynamic fashion (i.e. not standard WebGIS).