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

土壤实际上是全球陆地生态系统的基础。土壤是维持生命、种植粮食、提供庇护所和实现人口流动所必需的。因此，了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；这种社会重要性也指出了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土壤传感系统和预测模型的研究和开发，以全面了解土壤在化学、物理和生物特性方面的当前状态和未来变化。这笔规划赠款将探索建立土壤动力学技术中心，其使命是支持关键行业，如精准农业、气候变化适应、自然资源开采、应急响应系统、边境安全和国防物流、生境建设、废物和水管理，以及其他岩土工程系统，在多个空间和时间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。拟议的中心旨在促进和利用传感器和设备、计算、通信、控制、仪器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。在这些方面，组件、子系统和系统级别的创新将导致新应用程序的激增。通过不同的学生、博士后和教师群体的参与，该中心将为代表不足的群体创造大量的机会和更广泛的参与。在许多科学和应用领域，对土壤特性的表层到根部剖面的全球观测，如水分、成分和温度是关键。这些观测对于量化水、能量和碳循环之间的联系是必要的，也是为了确定两个几乎没有观测到的通量--蒸散和补给。在北极，从地表到永久冻土层的土壤剖面特性是了解气候变化对新北极的影响的关键。在农业方面，这样的观察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，战术决策是根据通行能力和地面稳定性来执行的。在过去的几十年里，在遥感和现场观测表层土壤性质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差距，以实现多尺度和多模式的观测情景，采用新颖的基于现场和低空无人机的传感器、高空机载和星载遥控器、能源型地面无线网络技术以及机器学习分析，将覆盖范围从现场扩大到区域。这项研究将立即惠及多个行业，例如为农业行业提供数量级的用水成本降低，防止含水层枯竭造成的地表下沉的经济影响，以及为国防工业提供新的观测技术。从长远来看，通过描述根区土壤湿度来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减少土壤污染和更大的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，用于参与中心大学校园内现有的许多研究、教学和创业活动。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.