Digital soil science and beyond

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Abstract
Digital convergence is helping us to better understand and study the soil. Fixed and mobile sensors, and wireless communication systems aided by the internet produce cheap and abundant streams of digital soil data that can readily be used for modeling and information generation. Here, we explore the ways in which digital science and technology have affected soil science. We can call this digital soil science and define it as the study of the soil aided by the tools of the digital convergence. To some degree, all of our research and teaching had been enabled, enhanced, and expanded by the digital convergence. We outline how soil science has changed using illustrations of intellectual and technical developments enabled digitally. Digital soil sensors have been widely implemented, and new tools such as cell phones and applications, or metagenomics techniques are becoming available. There are also areas in soil science for which no major obstacles in the digital technologies exist, but which have not been thoroughly investigated—for example, to devise a truly digital soil field description or for building a formal digital quantitative system of soil classification. The soil science community will need to be alert to some of the dangers brought by digital convergence such as the lack of new theory and proprietary (black‐box) soil prediction. Finally, we discuss a whole set of digital tools that will, or might, gain the stage in the immediate future and take a stab in the dark on what may lie over the horizon of digital soil science.

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