PFI-TT: Automating Soil Organic Matter Separation to Monitor Soil Carbon Sequestration

PFI-TT：自动化土壤有机物分离以监测土壤碳封存

• 批准号: 2044760
• 负责人: Francesca Cotrufo
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: Colorado State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-06-15 至 2022-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2044760&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: PFI; TT; Automating; Soil; Organic

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to facilitate and enhance the throughput of soil analyses, consisting of the separation of the light from the heavy components of soil. These two soil components have different capacities to sequester carbon, are differently vulnerable to disturbance, and have different impacts on plant fertility. Therefore, their separation is key to inform soil management with regard to mitigating climate change and sustaining food production. New soil analysis products are needed to facilitate low cost, fast, and accurate testing. The team proposes to prototype an instrument able to turn a time intensive, manual laboratory method into a high-throughput automatic process that minimizes operator time, increases laboratory consistency, and reduces consumables. This proposed instrument will make this analysis possible on a high number of samples, supporting the adoption at scale of management practices to sequester carbon in soil and increase soil health, with the potential for broad societal and commercial impact. This project develops an innovative laboratory instrument to automatically perform the separation of soil into light and heavy components. Soils are recognized as a valuable resource to sustain food production, because they store vast amounts of carbon and recycled nutrients. However not all soil is equal, with the light component recycling faster than the heavy. Thus, component separation is key to advancing understanding of soil function and to informing regenerative soil management. The separation of soils into these two components has been limited by the lack of a fast, reliable, and reproducible method. The team will prototype and test an innovative instrument to perform this separation across a broad number of soils spanning the different US ecosystems. This instrument will enable scientists to study soils focusing on two distinct fractions rather than bulk soil only, accelerating the advancement of the scientific understanding of soil processes.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.

这一创新-技术转化伙伴关系(PFI-TT)项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是促进和提高土壤分析的吞吐量，包括分离土壤的轻组分和重组分。这两种土壤组分具有不同的固碳能力，对干扰的敏感性不同，对植物肥力的影响也不同。因此，它们的分离是土壤管理缓解气候变化和维持粮食生产的关键。需要新的土壤分析产品来促进低成本、快速和准确的测试。该团队提议制作一种仪器原型，能够将时间密集型的手动实验室方法转变为高通量的自动化过程，从而最大限度地减少操作员的时间，增加实验室的一致性，并减少消耗品。这一拟议的工具将使这一分析在大量样本上成为可能，支持在管理实践的规模上采用，以隔离土壤中的碳并提高土壤健康，有可能产生广泛的社会和商业影响。该项目开发了一种创新的实验室仪器，可以自动将土壤分为轻组分和重组分。土壤被认为是维持粮食生产的宝贵资源，因为它们储存着大量的碳和可循环利用的养分。然而，并不是所有的土壤都是平等的，轻组分的回收速度比重组分快。因此，组分分离是促进对土壤功能的理解和为再生土壤管理提供信息的关键。由于缺乏一种快速、可靠和可重复的方法，将土壤分离成这两种组分的方法一直受到限制。该团队将制作并测试一种创新的仪器，以在横跨美国不同生态系统的大量土壤中执行这种分离。该仪器将使科学家能够重点研究两种不同的土壤，而不仅仅是整体土壤，加快了对土壤过程的科学理解的进步。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。