Introduction
In December 2021 the Open Soil Spectral Library (OSSL) was launched by soilspectroscopy.org under the project Soil Spectroscopy for Global Good. Users can both upload and download soil spectral data to OSSL. This post is just a short introduction including a set of links to different resources related to soil spectroscopy and OSSL.
On the OSSL GitHub pages you find a brief introduction on What is soil spectroscopy and lists of the Soil properties of interest for soil spectroscopy projects. There is also a list of Suggested literature to dig deeper in to soil spectroscopy.
Soil.Spectroscopy
Soil.Spectroscopy and the Soil.Spectroscopy 4 global good (SOILSPEC4GG) is a USDA-funded Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools Coordinated Innovation Network. The project brings together soil scientists, spectroscopists, informaticians, data scientists and software engineers to overcome some of the current bottlenecks preventing wider and more efficient use of soil spectroscopy. A series of working groups will be formed to address topics including calibration transfer, model choice, outreach & demonstration, and use of spectroscopy to inform global carbon cycle modeling.
SOILSPEC4GG major outputs:
Woodwell Climate Research Center
The main partner in the OSSL project is Woodwell Climate Research Center under the leadership of Jonathan Sanderman. With the release of the first version of OSSL they published the summary article Introducing the Open Soil Spectral Library on 6 December 2021.
OpenGeoHub (OGH)
One of the partners behind OSSL is the Dutch NGO OpenGeoHub (OGH), as outlined in the article Open Soil Spectral Library first release by Tom Hengl published 22 December 2021.
OSSL
Links to various OSSL related resources:
Retrieving OSSL data
There are several possible routes for accessing the OSSL data but this blog only covers the Online API explorer.
Online API
The online API contains two entries, 1) an Engine for entering data into the database and 2) an Explorer for searching and retrieving data. The next post in this blog outlines how to use the OSSL Explorer API.