Dr Liang Wang
Project Leader
The University of Newcastle
This project aims to address the issue of costly and time-consuming laboratory soil health measurements to provide farmers with affordable rapid in-field solutions without sacrificing accuracy.
The healthy functioning of agriculture ecosystems primarily depends on soil organic matter (SOM), which is often difficult to measure directly. The activities of soil enzymes facilitate the SOM decomposition, which releases plant-available nutrients, such as nitrogen. Therefore, the measurement of soil enzyme activities as bio-indicators, can provide quantitative information on SOM and microbial health.
This project will develop an innovative, field-based tool kit to rapidly determine soluble SOM and key biological functions through expanding the current investment in the Soil CRC project Affordable rapid field-based soil tests.
The project will extend the current colourimetric protocols to include measurements of enzyme activity, soil organic carbon, and additional biologically mineralised nutrients via rapid field-based soil testing ‘lab-on-a-chip’ technology. The colour results will be captured using a smartphone camera with an application that will automatically convert them into quantitative information using ‘lab-on-a-phone’ technologies.
The prediction accuracy will be improved significantly by minimising the impact of interferences using chemometric methods. The project will advance the current soil measurement technology and provide novel, affordable and rapid in-field measurement tools for day-to-day use. It will benefit farmers by having quick, cheap tests that can measure soil organic carbon on site and accurately.