Trainings Underway! The first webinar of the GLOSOLAN capacity building program was successfully held
In order to strengthen the analytical capacity of soil laboratories worldwide, GLOSOLAN is organizing a series of training sessions. The first series focusses on soil spectroscopy to help countries to understand soil conditions, improve agricultural productivity and reverse land degradation.
Six webinars on soil spectroscopy, led by leading scientists, are being held throughout this second half of 2021 to provide participants with the basics of the most advanced aspects of this topic. To enable all interested parties to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity, the FAO Global Soil Partnership is making video recordings of all webinars available free of charge on the GLOSOLAN website. They include subtitles in several languages.
On September 6, 2021, Prof. Bo Stenberg from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden, gave the first webinar of the series and introduced the basics of soil spectroscopy to the participants. He started by reviewing the basic mechanisms for soil Visible–Near Infrared (vis–NIR) spectroscopy. It was followed by detailed information on applications related to precision agriculture and the use of large regional soil spectral libraries for estimating small scale variations. Nearly 700 participants from 102 countries followed this first webinar and debated through an active questions and answers sessions. One of the main conclusions was drew from this webinar is that soil spectroscopy has shown to be a time- and cost-effective, environmental-friendly, nondestructive, reproducible, and repeatable analytical technique. This technology can be an alternative to wet chemistry for soil monitoring.
The next appointment is scheduled on the 16th of September 2021 with Prof. Budiman Minasny. He will focus on using soil spectroscopy for accurate measurement of soil physical and chemical soil properties.
Stay tuned as more topics will be covered in the next months, including Wet chemistry, Health and Safety, Equipment purchasing, Quality assurance and quality control, and Laboratory management etc.).
Related links
GSP: http://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/en/
GLOSOLAN: http://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/glosolan/en/
GLOSOLAN capacity building programme: http://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/glosolan/soil-analysis/capacity-development/en/