AGRIFAST: A joint Italy-Israel laboratory for hyperspectral remote sensing of agricultural soils for promoting precision farming from satellite.

The process of innovation in the context of precision agriculture is very rapid and constantly changing, especially concerning the development and use of ground- and remote-based sensors and their networks, and the practical application of simulation models. The two partners at TAU-Israel and CIRAM-Italy propose the setting up of a new joint laboratory that will benefit from the available experience, expertise, and know-how on soil hydrology sciences and remote sensing of soil. TAU is a world leader in soil spectroscopy and soil spectral modeling from close and far remote-sensing domains, and CIRAM is a world leader in soil hydrological monitoring using innovative field and laboratory equipment and infrastructures. Accordingly, both parties will exchange students and staff to share both parties’ knowledge and as well as share facilities. The core idea is to establish a laboratory that will be ready to exploit the state-of-the-art hyperspectral remote sensors for mapping soil physico-chemical and hydraulic properties. The hyperspectral remote-sensing data will be soon available from orbit through a joint project of the Italian and Israeli space agencies ASI and ISA-SHALOM. The main research objective of this laboratory is to assist precision farming by building a soil spectral library (SSL) of about 6,000 soil samples (4,000 samples from the Italian region of Campania, and 2,000 samples from Israel), which will be subjected to measurement of soil characteristics (such as soil organic matter and hydraulic conductivity) and spectroscopy. The project will last 3 years but the laboratory that will be constructed here will continue to be fully active long after the project will end. This will be done by updating routinely the soil data archive and extending it geographically. The lab will call other groups in Italy to share soils to form a national SSL. This data set will serve as a valuable set of information to peruse quantitative soil mapping from both field and space domains using state-of-art spectral technology. A novelty of this library is the merging of spectral information, measured using developed standards and protocols, with soil properties being rarely found in other soil spectral libraries, such as oven-dry bulk density, soil-water retention function, infiltration rate, and more. The expected outcomes of the joint laboratory are the development of spectral-based models that rely on this soil spectral library and allow the prediction of the spatial, and perhaps also temporal, variations of soil characteristics in a certain area. A future perspective is that, in the long term, these models (and others to be developed) aim at implementing the hyperspectral remote sensing (HSR) data from space to provide thematic maps to the end-user and prepare the soil community to utilize hyperspectral remote sensing for precision soil mapping and monitoring.