Associate Professor Peter Dahlhaus
Project Leader
Federation University
The Visualising Australasia’s Soils (VAS) project aims to make Australasian soils data from all sectors visible and reusable, according to agreed governance principles, so that Soil CRC participants can maximise the value of their research.
VAS has two long-term objectives:
- To make existing soils data more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) to provide a range of benefits for research, on-farm decision making and policy development.
- To integrate with other initiatives from the local to international scale that are aiming to liberate soils data and make it available according to the FAIR framework.
Phase 1 (this project) ran from 2019-2021 and saw the launch of the Visualising Australasia’s Soils (VAS) spatial data portal. The VAS portal provides an online place to discover and share soils information, activities and research from Australia and New Zealand.
Phase 1 collaborators included three universities, one government agency, 13 farmer groups, two Catchment Management Authorities and one industry partner. Engaging with the project participants helped us understand their motivations for being involved in the project and their aspiring use-cases for the VAS system.
The design of the system architecture was based on the use-cases, resulting in a federated data supply model that includes a cloud-based data aggregator for the participant’s soil data.
Bringing together the data has been unexpectedly challenging because of the lack of metadata, immature data stewardship practices, poor data literacy of the participants, and the incongruency of the data. Harmonising and modelling the federated data into reliable products posed a significant challenge.
At the end of the first phase, the participants had provisioned 827 soil sites at which approximately 4384 samples were taken with about 77,332 soil observations. Some of the 1628 open public sector soil datasets available were publicly viewable in the VAS portal.
Phase 2 of the project (2021-2024) aims to create an independent and enduring soil research data federation of public and private sector data. Key objectives are motivating soil data custodians to make their data ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable’ (FAIR) and aligning with other initiatives to maximise discovery and reuse.
The research will now continue under Phase 3 (2024-2027), which will focus on the system’s legacy and transforming VAS into an enduring Australasian soils knowledge system.
