In no particular order, a list of the most commonly asked questions, followed by the simplest possible answer:
- Who?
- Who is this for? Anyone with an interest in soil health
- Who is behind it? Walt Ludwick for Quinta Vale da Lama, in partnership with GROW Observatory and FCUL (Faculty of Sciences, Lisbon University)
- Why?
- Why bother? Because global climate change is affecting our soils in such a way -desertification being the most clear and present risk to our natural resource base- that soil moisture is probably the most important ecological indicator we have to monitor
- Why not monitor using satellite data? a useful, but not complete solution, as available data is too low-resolution/ high-latency to give us the nuanced and timely feedback we need. Putting that data together with this sensor data (i.e. "ground-truthing" of satellite data) gives the best possible picture; that is in fact the motivation behind EU funding of this project.
- What? see project README.md for answers, including...
- What are the general aims?
- What are the specific objectives? Metrics?
- How? see project README.md
- How essentially does this work?
- How do you avoid...?
- Where?
- Where is it currently deployed? Various sites in 11 countries around Europe, of which Quinta Vale da Lama has the largest deployment (175 sensors) as of this writing.
- What is the intended scope of deployment? 375 sensors (including the 175 above) in West Algarve, another 500 or more in Alentejo... and 15k around Europe, by the end of the project.
- When?
- When did it begin? early 2017
- What is the term of the project? committed funding from EU runs out in autumn of 2019
- Are there any deadlines, or scheduled progress milestones? we aim to get all sensors in Portugal deployed by end of 2018 -for sure before end of Q1 2019.