Soil & Landscape Science Lab

Welcome to our blog

Here we share focused updates on our research, teaching, and ongoing projects. You’ll find summaries of new findings, field and lab work in progress, course activities, and reflections on developments in soil and landscape science.

Browse our posts below

Sand, clay and carbon: can a mine’s by-products help poor soils hold more?

Much of the Western Australian Wheatbelt sits on deep sandy soils. Sand drains fast and holds little. It struggles to keep clay, organic matter, nutrients and water in the…

An underground census: what bacteria and fungi tell us about ecosystem health

ecosystem monitoring

Most of what keeps an ecosystem working happens out of sight. Beneath every grassland, forest, farm and desert shrubland is a living community of bacteria, fungi and other…

The missing number: how much more carbon can soils hold?

carbon saturation

machine learning

Soil carbon is often treated as if every soil is an empty bucket waiting to be filled. Add more plant residues, reduce disturbance, improve management, and the soil should…

Soil carbon models, process realism, and AI

biogeochemical modelling

soil carbon modelling

For many years, soil carbon models succeeded by remaining simple enough to work with limited data. They represented the soil system using a few conceptual pools that decayed…

Why soil sensing needs more than spectroscopy

For the past twenty years or so, soil sensing has been almost synonymous with soil spectroscopy. Visible, near-infrared and mid-infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy…

From slogan to system: a sensing‑enabled view of soil health

sustainable development

Hu et al. (2026) propose a sensing-enabled framework that redefines soil health as an ecological condition relative to a soil’s natural potential, and argue that proximal…

Landscapes, soils, and the stories they tell

landscape science

geospatial science

Indigenous knowledge

Landscapes and soils shape many of the environmental challenges we face, from food production and water security to biodiversity conservation and climate change. Our new…