OR/15/030 Appendix 2

Nicole Archer, Barry Rawlins, Stephen Grebby, Ben Marchant and Bridget Emmett. 2015. Identify the opportunities provided by developments in earth observation and remote sensing for national scale monitoring of soil quality. British Geological Survey Internal Report, OR/15/030.

Expert survey questions

Dear named RS expert

Monitoring soil indicators using remote sensing – request for small expert contributions

We are currently undertaking a review on behalf of UK government on the application of remote sensing of specific soil properties / indicators because they wish to know whether (and how) such approaches could contribute to soil monitoring. We consider you/your team to be experts on this topic based on your previous research. Our team at the British Geological Survey have used remotely sensed data in our research to examine spatial variation of soil properties, but as you will be aware, repeated monitoring to detect change is a more demanding requirement. Accordingly, there are relatively few systems and techniques that offer a reliable means of monitoring the various soil properties.

We have collated a database of published studies that have utilised remotely sensed data for soil applications, which monitor physical soil state and change. However, this cannot include the most recent work that scientists around the globe are developing. We are writing to ask whether you are using a new or novel approach that may not yet be in the published scientific literature (and so we would not be aware of), but which may have applications in detecting changes in soil properties or to enhance prediction or state of soil properties. We would be grateful of you could write a short description (one paragraph maximum) of any methods you have developed in the last 12 months that may have relevance to our study.

total nitrogen, magnesium (extractable), potassium (extractable). We are also interested in methods to assess soil erosion and compaction. Although we do not consider there is any sensor which can detect metals remotely, the following soil properties are also on our list of indicators: total copper, total cadmium, total zinc and total nickel

We do not wish to appear to be offering nothing in return for your contribution so we have made our reference database relating to “Soil+Remote Sensing+Monitoring” available to you via a link at the end of this email in various formats (Endnote, BibTex, RefMan RIS, .csv, .txt) so you can download it and use it yourself. The database is focussed on temperate environments similar to the UK but we have included studies relating to arid settings for completeness. The reference database can be found at the following location: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/75en2inmnis6xmr/OwBMlEJpid

Thank you in advance for any information you can provide to our study. Any reply you make would need to be with us by Friday 28th February 2014 so that we can use it in our report. If you would like any more details relating to our study then please let us know.

Yours sincerely,

Barry Rawlins (bgr@bgs.ac.uk) & Nicole Archer & Stephen Grebby

Table 1 Expert survey participants

Institute	Expert
1. GFZ Potsdam	Prof S Chabrillat
2. Wageningen University	Dr Harm Bartholemeus
University of Zurich	Prof M Scheipmann
US Department of Agriculture	Dr M Moran
Tel-Aviv University	Prof E Ben-Dor
INRA, FRance	Cecile Gomez