Planning IUCRC at University of Southern California: Center for Soil Dynamics Technologies

南加州大学 IUCRC 规划：土壤动力学技术中心

• 批准号: 1922548
• 负责人: Mahta Moghaddam
• 金额: $ 1.5万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-07-15 至 2022-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1922548&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Planning; IUCRC; University; Southern; California

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.

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;这种社会重要性也指向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，以全面了解土壤的化学，物理和生物特性的当前状态和未来变化。这项规划拨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，栖息地建设，废物和水管理，和其他岩土工程系统，在多个空间和时间尺度上进行全球土壤动态的尖端测量和建模。这被设想为一个国家中心，支持这些关键行业的研发团队，使他们能够分享我们的技术和数据的信息，技术和应用。该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，为土壤环境提供持久的长期观测和探索能力。在这些方面的组件、子系统和系统级别的创新将导致新应用程序的激增。通过学生，博士后和教师的多元化群体的参与，该中心将创造包容性和代表性不足的群体更广泛参与的众多机会。土壤水分、组成和温度等土壤特性的地表至根区剖面的全球观测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，并确定两个几乎未观测到的通量：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影响的关键。在农业方面，这种观测与精确农业的新发展相联系，以规划灌溉模式和作物轮作。在地面作战中，战术决策是根据通过性和地面稳定性来执行的。在过去几十年中，在表层土壤特性的远程和现场观测方面取得了很大进展，但近表层土壤剖面实际上仍然没有观测到。土壤动力学技术中心通过研究来解决这一主要的知识差距，以实现多尺度和多模态的观测场景，采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，以扩大从原位到区域覆盖范围。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用水成本降低，防止含水层枯竭引起的地表沉降的经济影响，并为国防工业提供新的观测技术。从长远来看，通过了解根区土壤水分特征，了解水和碳循环之间的反馈，实现更准确的气候预测，将有助于采取经济上可行的适应措施。这种更好的理解也将有助于实现社会目标，如减少土壤污染和提高粮食安全。此外，该中心将成为一个更广泛的跨学科知识综合的焦点，许多活动已经存在于参与中心的大学校园的研究，教学和创业。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。