Advancing Australia’s soil knowledge system

The project team have also made substantial progress in upgrading the web framework on which the VAS portal has been built.

“This provides a more robust, flexible, and efficient means to add functions and applications to the VAS system, including a metadata catalogue, addition of links to ancillary data, and easier self-serve for adding data sets,” Associate Professor Dahlhaus said.

“Phase 3 will also harness artificial intelligence to add value to soil performance data, and enhance the reporting of soil quality, function and target values for high performance soils.”

The project team are developing a governance model, including data governance and stewardship guidelines, for managing VAS beyond the life of the Soil CRC.

The final phase is a collaboration between Federation University, the University of Newcastle and a Community of Practice involving Soil CRC participants across Australia, including Burdekin Productivity Services, North Central CMA, Riverine Plains, Southern Farming Systems, Western Australian No Till Farmers Association (WANTFA) and West Midlands Group.

“The primary goal of the Community of Practice is to foster continuous learning and development, enabling our project partners to stay updated with the latest technologies and innovations relating to the portal,” Associate Professor Dahlhaus said.

“The Community of Practice will establish and agree on key use-cases, which will be developed and implemented over the coming months to enhance the value of VAS outcomes for all project partners.”

Associate Professor Dahlhaus emphasised that this is challenging research that requires an understanding of both the physical and social barriers to data sharing, as well as identifying what motivates data custodians to share their soil data.

“The project involves finding the value proposition for the participants and end-users and managing the technical challenges of making it all work in an intuitive-to-use, seamless and effortless manner,” he said.

Research has been conducted using social science methods to examine the perceptions, role and application of VAS by project partners. Led by Dr Alison Ollerenshaw (Federation University), the project team identified that there is broad agreement in the contribution of VAS, and anticipated expectations for soil data sharing and management using the portal.

However, data custodians remain reluctant to openly share data. The reasons are complex, but generally include:

• Data custodians’ uncertainty about whether they had the right to share soil data
• Farmer groups’ need to retain the trust of their members
• Concern about VAS sharing their data with other federations (in the future)
• Concern that long-term data availability and security may cease with the project
• The difficulty in supplying the required metadata (e.g. who ‘owns’ these data?).

Activities are underway to address these challenges and to build the value proposition for VAS that will enhance its adoption and application by data custodians and industry stakeholders. Ongoing research will also be conducted to explore and extend the insights about VAS from stakeholders and to assess its contribution as a federated soil data knowledge system. The research will provide evidence that will inform and guide future data federations.

The project team explores these challenges and opportunities in more detail in an article published in the Soil Use and Management journal: ‘The Opportunities and Challenges Associated With Establishing a National Soil Data Repository From Public and Private Actors’.