Soil

Numerical site-response predictions often deviate from observations, yet correcting these discrepancies is difficult because records are limited in both sensor coverage and number of events. This study proposes the Transfer-Enabled Forced Latent Autoencoder for Response Equations (FLARE-T) to improve these predictions by learning and calibrating low-dimensional latent dynamics that connect the base acceleration input to acceleration outputs at multiple depths. FLARE-T learns a low-dimensional response manifold and input-driven dynamics from dense finite-element simulations. It then trains a sparse encoder to map simulated sensor responses into the learned coordinates and uses limited records to calibrate the dynamics within them. A short response window initializes each prediction, while the complete base motion drives the response. The framework was evaluated using a layered-soil centrifuge test and the Lotung field vertical array. Test-set results show that FLARE-T improved multi-depth acceleration histories and 5%-damped pseudoacceleration response spectra relative to the original finite-element models, reducing errors at every evaluated sensor for motions of different intensities and, at Lotung, for both horizontal components. Two Lotung source models with different constitutive parameters achieved comparable test-set accuracy, indicating reduced dependence on precise prior calibration. FLARE-T therefore provides a data-efficient means of combining dense numerical response information with limited field records to improve future site-response predictions.

Herbicide-based weed control is increasingly unsustainable due to rising weed resistance and the adverse environmental impacts of chemical use. While mechanical weed control avoids these drawbacks, it is typically implemented using large machines that cause soil compaction. We propose a novel alternative based on small mobile robots for mechanical weeding. Compared with existing automated mechanical weeding approaches, the proposed method offers reduced soil compaction, simpler automation, and improved scalability. Our solution involves a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot equipped with a custom weed removal tool featuring a milling bit at its end. The tool is rigidly attached to the robot and uses the degrees of freedom of the robot base by actuating the legs, while keeping the feet stationary. We develop a software architecture that enables autonomous weed removal and integrate this system with all other required components. We analyze the accuracy and efficiency of the current proof of concept both in an indoor and outdoor environment and provide recommendations for future work to make the system more accurate and efficient.

Accurate prediction of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from agriculture is important for assessing environmental impacts and supporting sustainable farming. However, prediction remains difficult because N2O emissions result from complex interactions among soil properties, climate, biochemical processes, and management practices, while high-quality observations are limited. Deep learning models can capture nonlinear relationships but often lack physical interpretability and may generalize poorly across environmental conditions. We propose the Knowledge-enhanced Agriculture-informed Neural Network (KAINN), a hybrid neural-mechanistic framework that extends the Agriculture-informed Neural Network by incorporating domain knowledge about fertilizer diffusion, soil respiration, and water-filled porosity. We evaluate KAINN using CNN, LSTM, and Transformer architectures across multiple growing seasons and input-feature configurations. The results show that KAINN generally provides lower root mean square error and mean absolute error and higher R-squared values than purely data-driven models and the original AINN. Analysis of the learned interfaces also shows smoother and more physically consistent parameter trajectories with reduced uncertainty. These findings demonstrate that incorporating environmental knowledge into neural networks can improve the reliability, interpretability, and generalization of agricultural N2O-emission predictions.

Agriculture faces many challenges, and robotic systems can play an important role in addressing them by improving the efficiency and sustainability of field operations. Among these challenges, preserving soil health is a critical concern, as vehicle-soil interactions can degrade the soil structure and produce unwanted surface deformation. A key step toward soil-aware robotics is to explicitly account for how vehicle traffic deforms the ground, yet soil state is typically not treated as a variable. We address this gap by proposing a framework to quantify traffic-induced soil deformation and estimate its evolution online from lidar observations. The method relies on a reduced-order parametric model that represents the soil behavior via physically interpretable parameters, yielding a continuously updated and observable representation of soil state. Experiments conducted in different soil conditions demonstrate the ability of the approach to capture deformation induced by the robot. By making soil response measurable and interpretable during operation, the proposed framework establishes a basis for soil-aware robotic operation, in which the estimated state can be exploited to adapt robotic behaviors in order to reduce soil degradation.

Earthmoving tasks such as excavation, backfilling, or embankment construction require deliberate repositioning of deformable soil. For these tasks, human operators use all shovel faces, while autonomous systems so far are limited to excavation and dumping. Current methods often rely on heuristic models but do not incorporate soil mechanics. We address this shortcoming by using Reinforcement Learning in a GPU-parallelized Material Point Method particle simulation. Our controllers are conditioned on material state such as shape and compactness, enabling skills that use multiple contact faces of the tool and displace material both inside and outside of the shovel. To use the same learned weights across machines, our policies operate in a normalized end-effector space and are deployed through a calibrated machine interface. We evaluate this calibrated transfer on an 11.5t hydraulic excavator and a 500g tabletop robot. We validate performance through autonomous construction of a 42m long, 2.1m high embankment in 45min, executing 201 individual policy strokes without failure, retry, or operator intervention. In a direct comparison, the autonomous controller matches an expert operator's progression speed and produces a higher, more consistent embankment. Additional qualitative backfilling and compaction experiments demonstrate the material-state awareness and calibrated transfer across machines.

Every engineered fill is specified by a maximum dry density and an optimum moisture content. Each determination needs a full Proctor test. Published correlations rest on one to four hundred specimens, usually from one laboratory at one compactive energy, and are seldom released. This paper releases a corpus without those limits. It holds 2,854 laboratory compaction tests from six public sources, across 162 provenance groups and four Proctor energy levels, with fines from 1.5 to 100%. Every record is audited to the Proctor method its source names, and no energy is inferred. Screening on the zero-air-voids condition removed 11.8% of harmonised records, and 5.7% of those with a measured specific gravity. A material share of published compaction data is physically impossible. The optimum degree of saturation over the corpus is 0.815 at a coefficient of variation of 11%. That is a baseline, not a constant. Both parameters are then estimated from one classification suite and the compaction standard. A tabular foundation model reaches R2 0.824 for density and 0.784 for water content under random folds. It reaches 0.727 and 0.696 with folds drawn around provenance, and 0.520 and 0.614 with a whole source held out. Compactive energy is negligible marginally yet decisive conditionally. Density on the 66 modified-Proctor records is predicted at R2 0.740 with it and -0.651 without. Symbolic regression yields closed forms coupled through a phase relation. No predicted pair can then exceed the zero-air-voids line. The predictions are for screening, not acceptance.

For emerging scientific research domains, local Small Language Models (SLMs) are becoming more attractive, as they offer stronger privacy control and more stable deployment pipelines than Large Language Models. However, in practice, scientific question-answering on SLMs often operates under inevitable constraints: small literature collections, fragmented evidence, limited context window and reasoning abilities. We propose the Evidence-Grounded Typed Knowledge Graph (EGT-KG), a retrieval framework to improve information retrieval with local SLMs. We assessed three question-answering settings: a vanilla Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow and two EGT-KG workflows: an automatically generated relation schema (AS) and an expert-defined relation schema (ES). Our experiments were evaluated with a six-dimensional evaluation framework (S3CRF: Soundness, Correctness, Completeness, Conciseness, Relevance, Fluency) on a Biopolymer-bound Soil Composite literature benchmark, showing that EGT-KG outperforms the vanilla RAG method in most settings, with the best improvement from llama3:8b: a Final Score of 70.37 (+14.67%) and 68.82 (+12.14%) by AS/ES EGT-KG variants.

Automated detection of subsurface cavities from Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is most difficult in soft, high-water-content ground, where conductive, water-saturated soil attenuates the signal and degrades cavity reflections, yet this is also the condition under which cavities most readily form. This paper proposes TriView-YOLO, a multi-view YOLOv12 detector for road cavity screening in such ground. Three co-registered views (longitudinal B-scan, horizontal C-scan, and cross-section B-scan) form a 9-channel input fused by a TripleInputConv layer that replaces the YOLOv12 stem; the rest of the network is unchanged, and bounding boxes are required on the longitudinal view only. Training used 1,600 expert-verified field samples, principally metropolitan road surveys of Bangkok, Thailand, acquired with a vehicle-mounted multichannel three-dimensional GPR mobile mapping system, with surveys over the firmer subgrades of Japan added to training and validation only. The test set comes exclusively from the Bangkok surveys, over soft marine clay with 80-140% water content and a water table at 1-2 m depth, a ground condition for which no dedicated deep learning cavity-detection evaluation has been reported. On this unaugmented, field-only test set, split randomly within surveys, the proposed model attains mAP50 of 0.558 +/- 0.028 over three seeds at 23.6 GFLOPs and 3.1 ms per image. Ablations show that removing the auxiliary views lowers mAP50 and recall, whereas public and synthetic training images, DINOv3 features, larger model scale, and COCO pretraining bring no gain.

Accurate estimation of soil microplastics and organic matter is essential to assess ecosystem health and support sustainable land use. This study presents a graph-based deep learning approach using Graph Attention Networks (GATs) to model spatial dependencies among 91 georeferenced soil samples. By incorporating spatial coordinates, soil properties, and land use data, a two-layer GAT architecture was developed to capture local interactions. The final model showed strong performance, achieving RMSEs of 625.06 ($R^2 = 0.87$) for microplastics and 0.43 ($R^2 = 0.91$) for organic matter. However, cross-validation results revealed limited generalization, probably due to the small sample size and sparse graph structure. These findings demonstrate the potential of GATs for spatial soil prediction and underscore the need for dense datasets and improved graph connectivity.

In this paper, a parametric physics-informed neural network for solving the heterogeneous soil thermal problem with borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) as singular sources is developed. There are three novel features in the present framework; namely, (i) the singularity is naturally removed by using analytical line source models; (ii) using the explicit formulation for gradient thermal conductivity enables physics-informed learning of the parametrization featuring the conductivity; (iii) the learned correction is utilized as an efficient universal corrector via superposition principles. We first introduce the decomposition of the temperature change and transform the approximation of the entire heterogeneous response to the correction compensating the difference between the practical solution and idealized homogeneous approximation. In such a way, the delta function singularity is excluded and the bulk heat transfer is captured for the sake of facilitating the effective training of the neural network. The original problem is then reformulated as a governing correction diffusion or advection-diffusion equation subject to a homogeneous initial condition. The linearly varying thermal conductivity is used to model the soil heterogeneity. We propose a physics-informed neural network to approximate a universal corrector with respect to a single borehole with unit heat extraction rate. As a result, the network is trained by minimizing the physics-informed and data-anchored loss function that is evaluated for sampled conductivity parameters on adaptively selected training points. In addition, we include the location indicator function regarding the source as a feature input of network and find that it helps the network to process the local information. We perform numerical tests to exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed method based on three different analytical models.

Near-Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional soil analysis methods, offering advantages such as speed, low cost, and non-destructive testing. This work proposes a machine learning (ML) approach to calibrate predictive models for carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) content in Oxisols and Inceptisols, utilizing NIR spectral data acquired with a portable MyNIR device. Various preprocessing methods were evaluated, with the most effective being the Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter and a robust outlier removal method based on the Nonlinear Iterative Partial Least Squares (NIPALS) algorithm coupled with a Huber loss function. Multiple validation strategies were compared, including 10-fold cross-validation, leave-one-out, and holdout via the Kennard-Stone method, followed by standardization. Stacking ensemble learning models were employed, using Partial Least Squares (PLS), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Ridge as base models, with linear regression as the meta-model. The models were evaluated using R2, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Ratio of Performance Deviation (RPD) metrics. The performance gap between soil types suggests the influence of pedological characteristics. Furthermore, the models achieved an RPD > 2.0 with low overfitting, validating the potential of this approach for rapid C and N quantification. This study contributes to the optimization of sustainable agricultural practices, aligning with the demand for efficient and environmentally friendly analytical methods. The developed technique enables faster decision-making for producers and consultants based on organic matter content, fertility indicators, and nutrient availability.

Soil properties relevant to agricultural and environmental applications are conventionally measured using elaborate laboratory methods involving physical and chemical processing. While highly accurate, these conventional methods are costly and time-consuming. In contrast, optical spectroscopy paired with machine learning enables rapid and cost-effective predictions of multiple soil properties. However, spectroscopic modelling is often considered unreliable, as the predictive accuracy varies between soil properties and individual samples. To balance this trade-off between cost and reliability, we introduce reject-to-remeasure: an AI-based measurement framework that combines probabilistic modelling with uncertainty-guided rejection. In this framework, soil samples are first analysed using spectroscopy, after which predictions are rejected if their predictive uncertainty exceeds predefined quality constraints. Rejected samples are subsequently remeasured using conventional laboratory procedures. On a regional visible-near-infrared spectral soil library from Québec, we demonstrate that reject-to-remeasure with modern foundation models (TabPFNv2.5 and TabICLv2) can facilitate the integration of optical spectroscopy into routine laboratory workflows while meeting user-defined accuracy requirements and reducing measurement costs.

Soil microorganisms control organic matter cycling and largely determine how soil systems can cope with and mitigate climate change and environmental threats. Representing microbial dynamics in process-based soil models is therefore critical to predict carbon cycling in soils, albeit highly challenging to inform from data. One promising approach to improve their parametrisation is the integration of genomic data, yet modelling the complex and unknown relationship between genomes and the processes the microbes are driving is an unsolved problem. In this work, we present the first hybrid modeling framework for deriving biokinetic parameter values of a process-based soil organic matter turnover model from metagenome-inferred functional traits based on DNA sequencing data. Our model predicts biokinetic parameters of the process-based model from genomic trait data with a neural network and integrates constraints from ecological theory and literature to ensure realistic behavior, even of non-observed state variables. We evaluate our method on synthetic genomic trait datasets of varying complexity and on real data, showing that our approach improves performance over multiple baselines and learns the dynamics of unmeasurable components of the process-based model effectively, even for small training datasets.

Top-soil organic carbon (SOC) prediction is fundamental to agricultural sustainability, land use policy and fertilization planning. Existing approaches face two limitations: they pair hand-crafted covariates with classical ML or single-modal deep models that miss rich spectral and temporal information, and grid-based architectures ignore the irregular spatial structure of field measurements. We introduce SpTGNN, a multi-modal spatio-temporal graph neural network addressing both. SpTGNN represents soil measurements as nodes in a heterogeneous graph with three edge types (spatial proximity, spectral similarity, elevation), and applies relational graph attention to learn separate patterns per relation. A fine-tuned TerraMind encoder extracts node features from Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1 and DEM signals, combined with per-sample environmental covariates and learned positional and temporal embeddings. A sparse Mixture-of-Experts module fuses the four streams via top-$k$ routing. Uncertainty is captured by pairing heteroscedastic regression (aleatoric) with deep ensembles (epistemic), and a Moran's $I$ penalty regularizes spatial autocorrelation. We evaluate on a global SOC corpus split into three regional instances ($\sim$49k samples globally, Africa $\sim$26k, Europe $\sim$14k). Our 5-member deep ensemble reports $R^2=0.762$, RMSE $=3.51\pm0.48$ g/kg and MAPE $=22.9\%$ on the Africa test split, improving over a tabular XGBoost baseline; the best single checkpoint reaches validation $R^2=0.864$. Ablations confirm the heterogeneous graph, MoE fusion and fine-tuned backbone each contribute substantively, and the ensemble UQ stack achieves post-calibration ECE of $0.031$ (hybrid) and $0.026$ ($β$-NLL). To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify foundation-model feature extraction, heterogeneous graph attention and decomposed uncertainty quantification for SOC estimation.

Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly driven by the uncertainties affecting the land surface representation and variability in Earth system models. To address this limitation, we present a data-driven framework AI4Land, for generating high-resolution historical reconstructions and future projections of key land surface variables. The framework follows a two-phase approach using a U-Net architecture. In the first phase, which is the focus of this work, it reconstructs annual land use and land cover by integrating coarse-resolution scenario data with static geophysical features. In a planned second phase, the resulting high-resolution maps will be used to predict dynamic biophysical variables, particularly leaf area index, at finer temporal scales. Trained on Earth observation data, the models learn to reproduce spatially explicit and physically consistent land surface patterns, extending temporal coverage to periods lacking direct observations. AI4Land was developed and trained on MareNostrum5, demonstrating how GPU-accelerated HPC infrastructure enables global-scale climate AI pipelines. The final product is a suite of open-source emulators designed for real-time coupling with digital twin platforms, such as those developed under the Destination Earth initiative. By delivering realistic and evolving land surface conditions on demand, this work aims to reduce critical uncertainties and improve the predictive power of next-generation climate simulations.

Understanding soil is fundamental to agriculture, carbon cycling, and environmental sustainability, yet progress is limited by fragmented and heterogeneous datasets that constrain modeling to small-scale predictive settings rather than high-dimensional representation learning. We introduce LUCAS-MEGA, a large-scale multimodal dataset constructed through systematic data fusion of European soil-environment observations, with the LUCAS survey as its backbone. The fused dataset comprises over 70,000 samples and more than 1,000 features spanning physical, chemical, environmental, biological, and visual attributes, aggregated from 68 source datasets. To enable integration at scale, we develop SoilFuser, a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop data fusion pipeline that standardizes heterogeneous data formats and measurement protocols, resolves inconsistencies and invalid entries (e.g., unit inconsistencies, codebook mismatches, and erroneous values), incorporates natural language annotations, and harmonizes multimodal attributes and metadata into a unified, machine learning-ready feature space. The resulting dataset captures key characteristics of real-world soil observations, including multimodality, uneven feature coverage, and heterogeneous uncertainty. To demonstrate the usability of LUCAS-MEGA for data-driven modeling, we pretrain a multimodal tabular transformer (SoilFormer) using a self-supervised objective based on feature masking, achieving stable training, strong predictive performance, and representations that support uncertainty-aware prediction. We further show that the learned representations recover relationships consistent with established soil processes. LUCAS-MEGA is released with open access and is accompanied by composable, agent-friendly APIs that support structured querying and data-driven workflows.

Soil contamination by heavy metals poses a persistent environmental and public health concern in rapidly urbanising regions of Ghana, particularly at unregulated waste disposal sites. This study applies an unsupervised machine learning framework to detect and characterise anomalous heavy metal contamination patterns in soils from twelve waste sites and residential controls in the Central Region, of Ghana. Concentrations of eight metals (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Zn) were analysed alongside standard health risk indices, including the Hazard Index (HI) and Incremental Lifetime Cancer Risk (ILCR). Isolation Forest and PCA reconstruction error each identified $12$ anomalous samples ($15.4\%$ of $78$ samples), while DBSCAN detected no density-isolated noise points. A consensus approach isolated six robust anomalies ($7.7\%)$, all spatially concentrated at a single site (S3). Anomalies exhibited approximately $70$--$80\%$ higher mean HI values than normal samples, with all consensus anomalies exceeding the HI$=1$ threshold. PCA reconstruction error showed a strong positive association with HI ($r \approx 0.8$), indicating consistency between multivariate deviation and health risk. Three distinct anomaly types were identified: extreme Cu enrichment at S3, anomalously low Ni at S4/S5, and moderate multi-metal (Pb--Zn) co-elevation at S9--S12. The results demonstrate that unsupervised machine learning provides granular, objective insight beyond aggregate indices, enabling targeted site prioritisation and risk-informed environmental management.

Crop yield prediction is one of the most important challenge, which is crucial to world food security and policy-making decisions. The conventional forecasting techniques are limited in their accuracy with reference to the fact that they utilize static data sources that do not reflect the dynamic and intricate relationships that exist between the variables of the environment over time [5,13]. This paper presents Attention-Based Multi-Modal Deep Learning Framework (ABMMDLF), which is suggested to be used in high-accuracy spatio-temporal crop yield prediction. The model we use combines multi-year satellite imagery, high-resolution time-series of meteorological data and initial soil properties as opposed to the traditional models which use only one of the aforementioned factors [12, 21]. The main architecture involves the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to extract spatial features and a Temporal Attention Mechanism to adaptively weight important phenological periods targeted by the algorithm to change over time and condition on spatial features of images and video sequences. As can be experimentally seen, the proposed research work provides an R^2 score of 0.89, which is far better than the baseline models do.