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

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.