10087398Developing Soil Health and Carbon Sequestration Measurement AI Datasets suitable for all UK Agricultural SoilClosedInvestment AcceleratorInnovate UKRecent estimates suggest that some 133 billion tons of carbon, roughly a fourth of all carbon emitted by humans since the Industrial Revolution, has been lost from soils globally.\[1\] Intensive agriculture has led to 33% of global soils becoming "acutely degraded", costing an estimated $231B p.a. globally\[2\]. Improving soil health and restoring carbon to soil is increasingly being recognised by governments worldwide as a key way to both help humanity achieve net-zero carbon emission goals as well as safeguarding crop yields against increasingly extreme climatic conditions: soils in poor health yield less in drought\[3\]. With increased press-coverage of climate change's effects, societal pressure is coaxing food/drink businesses (e.g., PepsiCo\[4\], Unilever\[5\]) to prioritise soil sustainability in their supply chains, and Carbon-offset schemes ostensibly reward farmers for improving soil health\[6\]. Unfortunately, a lack of good-quality, affordable testing for soil health is undermining these abovementioned efforts. Previously, PES developed an industry-leading soil health assessment product for arable farming on mineral soils (IUK-project 31793). In this project, PES will address the need for good-quality, affordable soil testing in agriculture by developing machine-learning datasets suitable for assessing both the health, and changes to long-term Carbon-content, of all UK agricultural soils. The project will achieve this by 1/ developing a scientifically-robust machine-learning dataset for soil Carbon for the PES sensor, that, through inclusion of otherwise-expensive biological indicators, will be the first to credibly measure short-term changes to long-term-sequestered Carbon; 2/ developing first-of-their-kind soil health datasets for peatland and pastureland for the PES sensor. \[1\]https://e360.yale.edu/features/can-carbon-smart-farming-play-a-key-role-in-the-climate-fight \[2\]https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-19168-3\_6 \[3\]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01376-8\#:~:text=Soil%20quality%20both%20increases%20crop,climate%20change%20%7C%20Nature%20Climate%20Change \[4\]https://www.fooddrinkeurope.eu/industry-action/pepsico-building-soil-health-and-fertility-with-precision-agriculture/ \[5\]https://www.unilever.com/planet-and-society/protect-and-regenerate-nature/sustainable-and-regenerative-sourcing/ \[6\]https://agreena.com/farmer/