The determination of the real impact of different farming practices on soil parameters, including soil chemistry and biological environments is crucial for farmers, since it can provide valuable insights about the effectivity of new methods involved in the agroecological transition. In particular, microbiological activity and soil organic matter content are key indicators of soil health, since they are related to fertility, and nutrient availability. The activity of microorganisms in soil, degrading organic matter, release CO2that can be measured using infrared detectors. As such, the determination of soil respiration through the measurement of CO2gas concentrations is a good candidate to rapidly and continuously assess both parameters. Moreover, soil respiration is an important process to understand soil carbon cycles. However, their widest use by the community of farmers has been hindered by the high cost of current commercially available measurement systems, especially within on our context (Latin America), limiting the research in the field.
During this project we want to build, test and document an open source and low-cost system to measure soil CO2 fluxes. We aim to test the effectivity of different off-the-shelf and low-cost gas sensors, and use different protocols to assess soil respiration, which will allow an accurate determination of the real performance of these devices (in situ, 24hr burst method, soil induced respiration). The final system will include a sensing chamber, a control/communication unit and a software to process data into meaningful indicators for farmers. Finally, we aim to develop a soil respiration system that could be used to work along local farmers and researchers. This device will allow us to understand better the complex processes behind soil carbon cycles and agricultural soil health.
Antonio Ruiz Gonzalez is Research Associate at Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge and the rest of the team is part of reGOSH (Red latinoamericana de tecnologías libres) and we are currently working on project UROS (Ubiquitous rural open source hardware)
We have some previous experience building soil respiration prototypes.
Link to the repository:
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