Location: Tropical Crop and Commodity Protection Research
Project Number: 2040-22430-027-052-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2023
End Date: Jul 31, 2025
Objective:
Healthy soils are foundational to stable and resilient agroecosystems. The CTAHR Hawaii Soil Health Team recently developed a robust soil health test and accompanying scoring index to measure and monitor soil health across a range of agroecosystems and soils in Hawaii. Through this process, they have built a rich, extensive database of soil health measurements for over 1000 samples, including soil microbiome data associated with each sample. Presently, however, the soil health test is based primarily on traditional wet chemistry indicators, leaving yet untapped the wealth of cutting-edge information contained within the microbiome dataset resulting from their assessments. Equally important, the relationship between soil health scores and biological parameters such as plant productivity needs to be defined. Therefore, the overarching goal of this research is to enhance the biological component of the soil health test and effectively use the scoring index to guide agronomic practices. Three broad objectives are proposed: 1) to identify key microbial indicators of soils with high soil health scores; 2) to relate the soil health score to plant productivity; and 3) to evaluate the use of the microbial indicators as a rapid and cost-effective soil health test associated with plant productivity.
Approach:
The research will use data-driven methods to integrate the substantial and complex microbiome data with experimental outcomes. For the first objective, machine learning techniques and statistical methods will be used to identify microbial indicators associated with a range of soil health scores. To address the second objective, greenhouse bioassays will be used to quantify plant productivity and nutritional status in soils with a range of soil health scores. Results from the greenhouse studies will be validated through a series of field experiments. For the final objective, rapid microbial fingerprinting will be used to diagnose soil health and plant productivity parameters. We will validate this novel approach through yield data from the greenhouse and field experiments.
