IUCRC Phase I University of Southern California: Center for Soil Technologies (SoilTech), Lead Site

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Healthy soils are needed to sustain life, to grow food, to provide shelter, to provide resilient infrastructure, and to enable mobility, but there is presently a lack of knowledge about many key aspects of soil and its dynamics such as variations in the moisture and organic matter content, and how these variations affect soil health and stability. The Center for Soil Technologies (SoilTech) is a partnership among the University of Southern California, Iowa State University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Washington to address this knowledge gap with a mission to support industries related to agriculture, defense, energy, and environment. By convening researchers across the nation with complementary areas of expertise, and by recruiting Industry Advisory Board members from a broad range of industry, foundation, and government organizations, SoilTech will make crucial progress in understanding soil dynamics. SoilTech will serve as a first-of-its-kind hub for technical exchange and research among these organizations, providing inter-disciplinary knowledge synthesis and broad applications of its research. SoilTech’s participating sites have strong education and outreach programs addressing underrepresented populations in STEM fields. These programs will train the next generation of workforce in soil measurement and monitoring practices that will broadly benefit society. The SoilTech research teams are poised to make significant advances in the understanding of dynamic processes in soils through four research themes - Soil Sensors and Sensor Networks; Soil Modeling and Data Analytics; Soil Carbon Capture and Accounting; and Soil Health and Sustainability. SoilTech-enabled research will meet a number of as-yet unaddressed needs in several industry sectors. SoilTech will provide the underlying research necessary to develop new, more efficient, and more sustainable ways of understanding soil properties and managing soils as a natural resource. At the University of Southern California (USC), their research contributions will include the development of miniaturized and inexpensive sensor systems for soil moisture, organic content, and contaminants, as well as soil data analytic methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence, ground-based and drone-based sensor swarms to probe the soil profile properties to the root zone, and soil geospatial analysis for decision support. Their research will be conducted with considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion woven into the fabric of our work. Their workforce development plan includes creation of new courses and training modules, utilizing the USC iPodia online distributed classrooms, experiential learning modules, and collaboration with the NSF I-Corps Hub: West region for student entrepreneurial engagement.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.