The Earth Rover Program – A seismic shift for non-invasive, scalable soil health monitoring

Soil is a complex ecosystem at the heart of all terrestrial life. Harbouring more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined, it is home to more than 60% of Earth's species and delivers 99% of calories for the human food system. More than 70% of global arable land is classified as degraded, whilst facing growing yield demands on limited land from the global food system. Monitoring soils and thereby improving soil health at scale is difficult due to their multiscale heterogeneity, limited accessibility of remote sensing techniques, and destructive, labour-intensive nature of soil coring. Geophysical techniques offer a tangible alternative. To date, active seismics have scarcely been considered for the living topsoil, a layer mere 10-50 cm below our feet.

We show how seismology with ultrahigh frequency wavefields generated by hammer strikes and recorded by cheap, bespoke geophones allows us to infer on soil parameters such as bulk density, soil moisture, topsoil depth, which are crucial to determining soil function and health. We present consistently high data quality up to 1500 Hz collected across three continents in more than 10 ecosystems and crop types, showcase pathway for automated data processing and inference, introduce novel low-cost MEMS sensors, and highlight our AI engines to fuse soil datasets.

Our non-profit organisation, Earth Rover Program, is tasked with implementing the vision towards a global soil health assessment of unprecedented resolution and coverage. This, in turn, can eventually equip farmers with spatially explicit, local knowledge of their soils’ state and suggest remedial, sustainable measures based on this novel data, with the potential to reduce environmental pressures and agricultural costs while increasing long-term yields.

For more information see: https://www.earthroverprogram.org/