Planning IUCRC at University of Washington: Center for Soil Dynamics Technologies (SDT)

土壤是全球陆地生态系统的基础。土壤是维持生命、种植粮食、提供住所和实现人口流动所必需的。因此，理解和预测土壤近地表动态的社会重要性怎么强调都不为过；如此重要的社会意义也意味着潜在的巨大商业影响。然而，目前还没有全国性的协调努力或实体来协调研究和开发土壤传感系统和预测模型，以全面了解土壤在化学、物理和生物特性方面的现状和未来变化。该规划拨款将探索建立土壤动力学技术中心，其任务是支持关键行业，如精准农业、气候变化适应、自然资源开采、应急响应系统、边境安全和国防后勤、栖息地建设、废物和水管理，以及其他岩土工程系统，在多个时空尺度上对全球土壤动力学进行尖端测量和建模。它被设想为一个支持这些关键行业的研发团队的国家中心，使他们能够共享我们的技术和数据的信息、技术和应用。拟议中的中心旨在促进和利用传感器和设备、计算、通信、控制、仪器仪表和数据平台方面的强大技术进步，这些技术进步可以为土壤环境提供持久的长期观测和勘探能力。在这些前沿的组件、子系统和系统级别上的创新将导致新应用程序的激增。通过不同群体的学生、博士后和教师的参与，该中心将为弱势群体的包容和更广泛的参与创造大量机会。全球观测土壤的表面到根区分布，如湿度、成分和温度，是许多科学和应用领域的关键。需要这些观测来量化水、能量和碳循环之间的联系，也需要这些观测来确定两种几乎未被观测到的通量，即蒸发蒸腾和补给。在北极，从地表到永久冻土层的土壤剖面特性是理解气候变化对新北极影响的关键。在农业方面，这种观察结果与精确农业的新发展有关，以规划灌溉模式和作物轮作。在地面作战中，战术决策是根据可通航性和地面稳定性来执行的。在过去的几十年里，在对地表土壤特性的远程和原位观测方面取得了很大进展，但近地表土壤剖面实际上仍然没有被观测到。土壤动力学技术中心通过研究来解决这一重大知识缺口，以实现多尺度和多模态的观测场景，利用新型的原位和低空无人机传感器、高空机载和星载遥感器、能量感知地面无线网络技术和机器学习分析，从原位扩展到区域覆盖。这项研究将立即使多个行业受益，例如为农业提供一个数量级的水使用成本降低，防止含水层枯竭引起的地表下沉的经济影响，并为国防工业提供新的观测技术。从长远来看，通过表征根区土壤湿度，了解水和碳循环之间的反馈，从而实现更准确的气候预测，将使经济上可行的适应措施成为可能。这种更好的理解也将有助于实现诸如减少土壤污染和提高粮食安全等社会目标。此外，该中心将成为更广泛的跨学科知识综合的焦点，为参与中心大学校园内已经存在的研究、教学和创业活动提供支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Soils are literally the foundation of the global terrestrial ecosystems. Soils are needed to sustain life, to grow food, to provide shelter, and to enable mobility of human populations. Therefore, the societal importance of understanding and predicting the near-surface dynamics of soils cannot be over-stated; such societal importance also points to potentially enormous commercial impact. Yet, there is currently no nationally concerted effort or entity to coordinate research and development into soil sensing systems and predictive models to comprehensively understand the current state and future changes of soils as regards their chemical, physical, and biological properties. This planning grant will explore building the Center for Soil Dynamics Technologies with the mission to support critical industries such as precision agriculture, climate change adaptation, natural resource extraction, emergency response systems, border security and defense logistics, habitat construction, waste and water management, and other geotechnical engineering systems with cutting-edge measurements and modeling of global soil dynamics on multiple spatial and temporal scales. This is envisioned as a national center supporting the R&D teams of these critical industries, allowing them to share information, techniques, and applications of both our technologies and data. The proposed Center is directed towards promoting and harnessing robust technological advances in sensors and devices, computing, communication, control, instrumentation, and data platforms that can provide persistent long-lived observations and exploration capabilities for the soil environment. Innovations at the component, subsystem, and system levels on these fronts will lead to a surge of new applications. Through the engagement of a diverse group of students, post-docs, and faculty, the Center will create numerous opportunities for inclusion and broader participation of underrepresented groups. Global observations of surface-to-root-zone profiles of soil properties such as moisture, composition, and temperature are key in a number of science and application domains. These observations are needed to quantify links in the water, energy, and carbon cycles, and also to determine two virtually unobserved fluxes, evapotranspiration and recharge. In the Arctic, soil profile properties from surface to the permafrost table are key in understanding the impacts of climate change on the New Arctic. In agriculture, such observations are linked to new developments in precision agriculture to plan irrigation patterns and crop rotation. In ground-based operations, tactical decisions are executed based on trafficability and ground stability. Much progress has been made in the past few decades in remote and insitu observations of surface soil properties, but near-surface soil profiles remain virtually unobserved. The Center for Soil Dynamics Technologies addresses this major knowledge gap through research to enable a multi-scale and multi-modality observational scenario, with novel in-situ and low-altitude UAV-based sensors, high-altitude airborne and spaceborne remote sensors, energy-aware terrestrial wireless network technologies, and machine learning analyses to scale up from in-situ to regional coverage. This research will immediately benefit multiple industries, such as offering the agriculture industry an order of magnitude reduction in water usage costs, preventing the economic repercussions of surface subsidence from aquifer depletion, and enabling new observational technologies for defense industries. In the longer term, enabling more accurate climate projections via understanding the feedbacks between the water and carbon cycles by characterizing root zone soil moisture will enable economically viable adaptation measures. This improved understanding will also help meet societal goals such as less soil contamination and greater food security. Additionally, the Center will become a focal point of broader cross-disciplinary knowledge synthesis for many activities already existing on participating center university site campuses in research, teaching, and entrepreneurship.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.