Bridging the Soil Health Data Gap: informing prioritization of soil data collection efforts

The sampling and analysis or visual examination of soil to assess its health status are widely practiced from plot to national scales. However, available data are often not made easily accessible and new data are not always shared with the wider public, creating a partial understanding of soil processes and health status across different geographies, as well as a misuse of resources.

To address these challenges, Varda has created an interactive digital soil platform, named SoilHive, which provides an overview of existing soil data across the globe, facilitates the identification of soil data gaps across regions, and supports soil data sharing and interoperability.

To facilitate the identification of functional soil data gaps, Varda created a visualization tool to enable users to identify the extent to which the data available in their selected regions of interest allow them to characterize key soil characteristics and functions, starting with soil health. To this end, Varda collaborated with a team at the Aberdeen University to define a minimum set of indicators and associated soil properties, covering diverse soil degradation processes and ecosystem services, to describe soil health at the local level with a focus on agricultural settings. SoilHive users will be able to select a region of interest and verify how many of those indicators are available to characterize soil health: the gap between the available data and the required data will be marked as the "Soil Health Data Gap" and described as the percentage of data over the total number of indicators.

This Soil Health Data Gap could facilitate the identification of those regions where data collection efforts should be intensified, informing the prioritization of actions aimed at bridging existing gaps while expanding the availability of soil data. Several proposed activities to address this gap include targeted soil mining activities to collect historical and non-digitized soil data, advocating for data-sharing collaborations among diverse stakeholders, and organizing brand-new soil sampling campaigns. Moreover, additional soil health definitions could be used to provide the user with different representations of soil health data gaps, in line with these definitions.

Closing the existing Soil Health Data Gaps bears significant importance, as it empowers us to deepen our comprehension of soil health dynamics. By expanding soil data transparency across all sectors and stakeholders, we would gain the ability to make well-informed decisions regarding optimal soil management practices, efficiently allocate resources, and strive to enhance soil health for the betterment of both present and future generations.