HDR Scholarship – Next-generation soil spectroscopic modelling with explainable machine learning

This scholarship is funded by project ‘Next generation soil carbon systems’, funded by the Australian Government, which proposes to develop next-generation measurement and modelling technologies to improve understanding of soil carbon dynamics in terrestrial and coastal marine ecosystems. Soil carbon connects with ecosystem functions and many UN sustainable development goals. But the dynamics of organic carbon in Australian soils are not well understood. We also do not have quantitative assessments of the carbon storage potential of Australian soils, nor do we know their vulnerability to environmental and anthropogenic change. This Joint Research Centre project will develop next-generation soil carbon systems to measure and understand better soil carbon dynamics in Australia’s terrestrial and coastal marine soils, determine their carbon storage potential and predict their vulnerability to change. Growing this understanding has significant environmental and socio-economic value for Australia. It can help guide climate change mitigation, maintain biodiversity, improve the biological function of ecosystems, improve soil condition, soil fertility, water storage, and productivity. This scholarship will focus on developing next-generation visible–Infrared (vis–IR; 400–28,000 nm) spectroscopic methods for measuring soil carbon content, carbon composition and other soil properties. The project will involve field, laboratory and computational experiments and will access fresh soil samples, samples stored in archives and continental and large global spectral libraries to develop state-of-the-art algorithms and interpretable spectroscopic machine learning models that are accurate.