The AgriDENZ project hosted an online workshop on Advances in Spectroscopy and Analytical Approaches for Characterizing Soil Organic Carbon on 30th September 2025 with speakers from New Zealand, Germany, Australia and Uruguay.
Marcus Schiedung from the Thünen Institute, Germany kicked off with an introduction to mid-infrared spectroscopy to study soil organic matter composition. He demonstrated that this method can provide compositional data based on functional groups, help to characterize pure organic matter and has biogeochemical relevance. Pierre Roudier from the Bioeconomy Science Institute - Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, New Zealand followed up and successfully demonstrated the scaling up of soil organic carbon (SOC) fractions at the national scale using the New Zealand national soil inventory data. Senani Karunaratne from CSIRO, Australia discussed how this method can provide data on operational soil organic carbon fractions for Australian landscapes. He stressed that there are multiple benefits to collecting information on SOC fractions (composition) in addition to total SOC and that a pragmatic, cost-effective fractionation scheme would not only accelerate the uptake of measurement technologies but also provide multiple pathways to assess landscape resilience and soil
health. Virginia Pravia from INIA, Uruguay concluded the online workshop by discussing the possibility of combining these techniques with stable isotope analysis stressing the urgent need for robust data from national soil inventories.
All speakers agreed that building soil libraries through mid-infrared spectroscopy with the help of national soil inventories will unearth a treasure of data, allowing for many applications in the future, as this technique is fast, cheap and replicable.
Watch the recording of the online workshop here: https://youtu.be/7GXCGLHNEko
