SLSL Blog
Here we share focused updates on our research, teaching, and ongoing projects. You’ll find summaries of new findings, field and lab work in progress, course activities, and reflections on developments in soil and landscape science.
An underground census: what bacteria and fungi tell us about ecosystem health
Soil life is extraordinarily complex, but its broad balance can still be read. Viscarra Rossel et al. (2026) in Communications Earth & Environment introduce a bacterial-to-fungal richness ratio, derived with deep autoencoders and explainable AI, as a scalable indicator of soil microbial structure and ecological susceptibility across Australia.
May 18, 2026
The missing number: how much more carbon can soils hold?
Soils are not empty carbon buckets — they have limits to how much organic carbon they can stabilise. Hu and Viscarra Rossel (2026) in SOIL show how mid-infrared spectroscopy and explainable machine learning can rapidly estimate the carbon saturation deficit, the missing number that tells us how much more carbon a soil could realistically hold.
May 13, 2026
Soil carbon models, process realism, and AI
The next generation of soil carbon models aims to represent more of the biology, chemistry, and physics of real soils. Prompted by Zhang and Viscarra Rossel (2026) in Geoderma, this blog explores what that added realism means for uncertainty, data needs, and AI.
April 15, 2026
Why soil sensing needs more than spectroscopy
The diversity of soil sensing technologies reflects the complexity of soil—spanning the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond. Hu et al. (2026b) in the European Journal of Soil Science explore the possibility of soil sensing with LIBS.
April 02, 2026
From Slogan to System: A Sensing-Enabled View of Soil Health
Hu et al. (2026) in the journal SOIL propose a sensing-enabled framework that redefines soil health as an ecological condition relative to a soil’s natural potential, and argue that proximal and remote sensing are essential to making soil health measurable at scale.
March 16, 2026
Landscapes, Soils, and the Stories They Tell
Exploring soil and landscape science through our new second year unit ENST2007: Landscapes, Soils and Surface Environments (LSSE).
February 13, 2026