I recently returned from Zambia, where Our Sci is supporting research efforts by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) into the delivery of extension services to smallholder farmers. Specifically, CIMMYT wants to know if using technology to deliver site-specific extension advice changes farmer adoption of good agronomic practices and soil health building activities […]
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We have released new features to make it easier for project managers to view and download stratification outputs and metadata from SoilStack without using the SoilStack API. When we first built SoilStack, with support from ESMC, we focused on ensuring that it was interoperable with MRV platforms. For this reason, the API was the main pathway to […]
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Dan TerAvest recently joined Ashley Hammac and Rita Abi-Ghanem for a webinar dedicated to exploring the vital topic of soil health and the power of soil health data!
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Over the past 18 months we have gathered feedback from many SurveyStack users (special thanks to OpenTEAM for their detailed feedback and continued support). Now we are beginning a major overhaul of the SurveyStack user interface (UI) and privacy settings in response to that feedback. In the first phase, which we hope to release in […]
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Feature Photo by Marie-Soleil Turmel Background When we started Our Sci in 2017, one of the first tools we built was a low-cost, handheld Reflectometer. The Reflectometer was used by the Quick Carbon project at Yale University to map soil organic carbon (SOC) at the landscape scale, by the Bionutrient Institute to predict nutrients in […]
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Feature Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash Why we built it Soil respiration (aka soil mineralizable carbon) is a measurement that consists of rewetting air-dried soil, a short-term incubation (1-3 days), and then measuring the CO2 emitted by soil microorganisms during the incubation period. Soil respiration is considered a strong indicator of soil health, affecting […]
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SoilStack users can now push fields and sampling locations into SoilStack via API, make stratification requests and receive sampling locations back within 1-2 business days.
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Introducing SurveyStack, the new Data Collection Platform from the Our-Sci Team When we first started Our Sci 3 years ago, we built our platform (Our Sci App v.1) around connecting hand-held instruments to mobile data collection apps. For the past few years, we have worked with numerous project partners, some who required integration with hand-held and […]
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Testing a novel approach to quantify soil Carbon using direct measurements with the Our Sci Reflectometer and soil metadata Previously, we highlighted the potential of soil carbon sequestration to remove significant CO2 from the atmosphere and discussed the challenges in developing pathways for soil carbon sequestration credits. One of the key challenges is the difficulty in […]
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Why soil Carbon matters Soils are the largest terrestrial pool of organic carbon on the planet, holding as much as 3,000 Gt of carbon in the upper 2 meters of soil. To put that into perspective, the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is currently about 870 Gt and annual CO2-C emissions from fossil fuels equal about 9.7 […]
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