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.

土壤实际上是全球陆地生态系统的基础。需要土壤来维持生命，种植食物，提供庇护所并实现人口流动性。因此，了解和预测土壤的近乎表面动态的社会重要性不能过分说明；这种社会重要性也表明了潜在的商业影响。然而，目前尚无全国一致的努力或实体来协调土壤感应系统的研发和预测模型，以全面了解土壤的当前状态和未来变化，这些变化是关于其化学，物理和生物学特性的。这项计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，例如精确农业，气候变化适应，自然资源提取，应急系统，边境安全和国防物流，栖息地建筑，废物管理，废物管理和其他geotechnical Engineering Systems，具有对全球土壤和时间级别的全球土壤动力学的最先进和模型。这被设想为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，仪器和数据平台的强大技术进步，这些技术可以为土壤环境提供持久的长寿观测和勘探能力。组件，子系统和系统级别的创新将导致新应用的激增。通过一组不同的学生，职位后和教职员工的参与，该中心将为包容和更广泛的人为群体的参与创造许多机会。在许多科学和应用领域中，对土壤特性（例如水分，成分和温度）的地表到根区域剖面的全球观察结果是关键。需要这些观察结果来量化水，能量和碳周期中的联系，并确定两个几乎没有观察到的通量，蒸散液和充电。在北极，从表面到多年冻土表的土壤剖面特性是理解气候变化对新北极的影响的关键。在农业中，这种观察与精确农业的新发展有关，以计划灌溉模式和作物轮作。在基于地面的操作中，战术决策是根据流量和地面稳定性执行的。在过去的几十年中，在对表面土壤特性的偏远和洋教观察中取得了很多进展，但是几乎没有观察到的近地面土壤剖面。 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.这项研究将立即使多个行业受益，例如为农业行业提供用水成本的数量级降低，从而阻止了含水层消耗所产生的地表沉降的经济影响，并为国防行业提供了新的观察技术。从长远来看，通过表征根部区域土壤水分来了解水和碳周期之间的反馈，可以实现更准确的气候投影，这将使经济上可行的适应性措施。这种提高的理解还将有助于实现社会目标，例如较少的土壤污染和更大的粮食安全。此外，该中心将成为许多已经存在于参与中心大学的现场研究，教学和企业家校园中的许多活动的更广泛跨学科知识综合的焦点。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查审查的审查标准来通过评估来通过评估来提供支持的。