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UNL, USDA collaborate on new digital mapping tool to optimize soil sampling

A new digital mapping tool is helping farmers optimize soil sampling.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor and hydrologist Trenton Franz was one of the designers of the algorithm and provided scientific backing for the Soil Sample Planning Organizer Tool, or SSPOT.

“The new app is really just to help answer the question of how many samples should I collect and where should I collect those,” he says.

Franz tells Brownfield the app helps farmers make more informed decisions on inputs by allowing users to define an area of interest, utilizing one of two optimizer algorithms.

“The first is kind of the most widely used to generate just a uniform grid. The other tool that we offer currently is to use the background soil information. So this is the the SSURGO database that the USDA provides,” he says.

The university collaborated on the project with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and ARS’s Partnership for Data Innovations. Project Coordinator Steven Russell says the app is designed with farmers in mind.

“Everyone who does field research and needs a random sampling protocol is going to have to determine where their sample points are going to be. SSPOT is designed to help people with that necessary first step,” he says.

A link to the SSPOT app can be found here: https://sspot.scinet.usda.gov/.

AUDIO: Trenton Franz, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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