SOLUM presents LUSII at Irish Geosciences Early Career Symposium - iGEO2020
January 09, 2020
SOLUM participated in the Irish Geosciences Early Career Symposium - iGEO2020, January 2020, Galway with a lightning talk (3 min) and poster presentation on “LUSII - Land Use and Soil Inventory for Ireland” and “SOLUM –Soil Organic Carbon and Land Use Mapping project”, respectively. Delegate speaker Dr Gabriela M Afrasinei
SOLUM talk on GIS framework for refining and integration of soil and land use data at IRLOGI GIS Conference Ireland 2019
October 09, 2019
Dr Gabriela Afrasinei gave a 20-min talk on SOLUM team's work at the Irish Organisation For Geographic Information - IRLOGI 24th Annual Conference 2019. The talk focused on how a GIS framework was built for reclassifying and coupling existing soil, land cover and management to refine soil and land use classes to meet soil organic carbon modelling needs for information and spatial scale detail.
Title: GIS for processing and refining soil and European Land use Inventory LUCAS for soil organic carbon accounting, by Gabriela Mihaela Afrasinei, Kevin Black, Stuart Green, Alina Premrov, Jesko Zimmermann, Matthew Saunders
The Irish Organisation for Geographic Information (IRLOGI) is the umbrella organisation for the Irish geospatial industry and is a member of EUROGI – the European umbrella organisation for geographical information (GI). Formed in 1995 to represent the Irish GI community, IRLOGI’s mission is to stimulate the development and effective use of GI across the country.
SOLUM talk at FOSS4G 2019 showing how European open data is used for national needs
August 29, 2019
International FOSS4G 2019 Conference talk on Processing and refining European Landuse Inventory LUCAS for National Needs: A Case study – Land Use and Soil Inventory for Ireland, LUSII (20 min). Authors: Gabriela Mihaela Afrasinei, Kevin Black, Stuart Green, Alina Premrov, Jesko Zimmermann, Matthew Saunders.
In the context of FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial), SOLUM presented the Processing and refining of OPEN data LUCAS for national needs, generating the "Land Use and Soil Inventory for Ireland, LUSII", with Dr Gabriela Afrasinei as delegate speaker on behalf of the SOLUM team.
The talk took place on Friday the 30th of August, at 14.30 in the Ronda Ballroom of The Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, Romania, which, along with the National Theatre of Bucharest and The University of Bucharest represented the venue of the 1000 participants Global FOSS4G conference.
This event has a tradition of over a decade and it is one of the most important geospatial focal points of the year. A traditional FOSS4G is made of specific events: hands-on workshops, code sprints, B2B, B2Gov events and the conference itself. The event attracted about 1000 participants from all categories: industry, academia&research and public sector.
There is a strong commitment at FOSS4G 2019 Bucharest to give focus on DATA management and data processing in a global context, strongly influenced by rising ways of collecting geo-enabled information, like the very successful space programs. Concepts like Big Data, Open Data, Data Cubes, Digital Economy, High Performance Computing, Cloud Based Technology, Exploitation Platforms are today common language in the geospatial world and we strongly believe that the FOSS4G community can significantly contribute to turn them into reality.
This year there was also a FOSS4G EO Data Challenge, where startups, developers, students and researchers were challenged to come up with useful, valuable or interesting open source applications using large volumes of EO data (and their evolution in time) and state-of-the art technologies (AI/ML, HMC, STAC, data cube, COG). Linking of EO data with other sources of open data (e.g. OpenStreetMap, Copernicus Services – Land, Atmosphere, Climate) was another focus.
Exploring the Irish soil series
July 23, 2019
The Irish Soils Information System (SIS) provides the first full coverage map of soil associations in Ireland mapped at a scale of 1:250,000. Soil associations are defined as groups of soils that co-occur in the landscape. The SIS also provides detailed information of the physical and chemical properties of each series from representative soil pits.
While information the series making up each association is easily available, the question of which associations contain a specific series is more difficult to answer. Here we provide an interactive plot (created with Plotly) that helps exploring the relationships between soils associations and series in an straight forward manner. Follow the link below and explore the graph to see in which associations the different series occur.
The plot is highly interactive with a number of useful options in the toolbar on the top left, it provides additional information by hovering the cursor over an item, an also allows to toggle some or all associations in the legend to explore all series within them (use double click to toggle all items).
Currently, for improved readability, the plot is limited only to series which occur in more than one association.
IGRM 2019 - The 62nd Irish Geological Research Meeting
March 02, 2019
SOLUM researcher Dr Alina Premrov presented the poster on Biogeochemical modelling of soil organic carbon-insights into the processing procedures of selected atmospheric input data: Part II-atmospheric nitrogen deposition from EMEP datasets at the 62nd Irish Geological Research Meeting, March 2019, held at UCD O'Brien Science Centre, Ireland. This work presented insights into the processing procedures of atmospheric nitrogen deposition (ND) data extracted from EMEP (2000-2016 yearly EMEP-MSC-W data, 0.1° resolution) in order to use them as ECOSSE inputs. ND data in netCDF format were further processed in Python 2.7 [5] using “netCDF4” module and an adapted “EMEP_NetCDF_data_to_csv” script. ND was computed for each year as a sum of all oxidised and reduced N (including wet- and dry- N) for all grid centroid points extracted for Ireland. As ECOSSE requires a single ND input values (and not time-series), the average 2000-2016 ND was calculated for each centroid grid-point from individual year-values and further processed in ArcGISMap10.6.1
IGRM 2019 - The 62nd Irish Geological Research Meeting
March 01, 2019
SOLUM researcher Dr Alina Premrov presented the poster on Biogeochemical modelling of soil organic carbon-insights into the processing procedures of selected atmospheric input data: Part I-an example from E-OBS climate datasets at the 62nd Irish Geological Research Meeting, March 2019, held at UCD O'Brien Science Centre, Ireland. This work presented insights into the processing procedures of gridded climate data in order to use them as inputs into ECOSSE. Data were extracted from the E-OBS daily gridded observational climate dataset for Europe. The extracted data were in netCDF format and further processed in R v.3.5.2 using adapted R-scripting and R-packages. E-OBS provides daily 1950-2017 data (e.g. maximum- and minimum-temperature, precipitation) with standard errors included, but with limited spatial resolution (0.25° regular grid) and without potential evapotranspiration (ET). ET is a required input in ECOSSE, and needs to be further modelled from extracted and processed climate data.
SOLUM at Soils for Society Symposium - A Conference to mark World Soil Day
December 05, 2019
SOLUM researcher Dr Alina Premrov presented the poster on Assessing the impacts of land management on soil organic carbon stocks using process-based biogeochemical modelling approaches at Soils for Society Symposium, held on the 5th of December at UCD, Ireland. The study highlighted the utility of process based biogeochemical models to predict SOC stock dynamics in relation to land use management and climate.
The Symposium was held in the UCD Clinton Auditorium, and focused on soils, their importance and protection, as a non-renewable natural resource and as natural capital that underpins all land-based ecosystem services our society benefits from.
Organisers: UCD School of Agriculture and food Science, UCD Earth Institute, Soil Science Society of Ireland, EPA
September 02, 2018
SOLUM participated in the 2018 Annual Conference of the British Society of Soil Science (BSSS) held at Lancaster University, UK with a poster presentation on the “Soil Organic Carbon and Land Use Mapping –SOLUM Project”, exposed by team member Gabriela M. Afrasinei. Throughout the two days, there were opportunities to network with practitioners from diverse organisations, explore how attendees’ research relates to the SOLUM project’s objective, benefit from useful feedback, hear differing views and opinions, and discover common ground related to the need for accurate classification of land use, soil types and management intensity in the modelling of soil organic carbon stock changes. The conference took place at Lancaster University between the 4th-5th September 2018, and provided an opportunity to focus on the issues of sustainable development and how healthy soils are central to achieving many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (https://www.soils.org.uk/node/1175). Keynote speakers addressed problems such as Soils and Food Security, Climate Change and Health and Water Quality, providing a platform to deliberate and discuss these critical topics.
Bilateral LULUCF Reporting meeting
October 01, 2017
SOLUM researchers Kevin Black and Jesko Zimmermann visited the EPA for a two day bilateral meeting between the Irish LULUCF reporting team and Gregor Levin of the University of Aarhus who is responsible for assessing land-use and land use change for the Danish national greenhouse gas inventory. The meeting focussed on exchanging experiences in national land use change reporting, and especially on the opportunities and challenges of using the EU Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) in reporting. A main focus was on the on-going cropland/grassland dynamics and how they are accounted for in Ireland and Denmark. The meeting will establish a closer relationship between the LULUCF reporting in Denmark and Ireland.
Refining the impact of land use change and grassland management through the ECOSSE and DayCent models.
August 13, 2017
SOLUM team member Dr Jesko Zimmermann went on a research visit to Aberdeen, UK to meet Jagadeesh Yeluripati from the James Hutton Institute, as well as Marta Dondini, Nuala Fitton and Matthias Kuhnert from Pete Smith’s lab at the University of Aberdeen. All are internationally renowned GHG modellers with vast experience in the DayCent and ECOSSE models.
The aim of the visit was to solve specific problems with the models which have arisen during the project, particularly in modelling changes in land use and grassland management intensity, and also to improve the general understanding of the models by talking to the experts.
During the meeting the specific problems with ECOSSE and DayCent were resolved, and the model calibration process was improved. Furthermore a collaboration was established which allows the project to further gain from the expertise to maximise the quality of the model outcomes.
July 31, 2017
An article in the Guardian indicates that while peatlands are one of the harshest environments on the planet they are also one of the most important in terms of carbon storage. New research hopes to reveal the role these threatened bogs could play in the climate change story.
July 31, 2017
EPA funded environmental research provides essential scientific support for environmental policy development, implementation and broader decision making. Since 1994, the EPA has funded research that has increased national understanding of our environment, the challenges it faces and responses to these. It has also developed high quality research capacity and supported innovation that is internationally respected.