Research | Page 6 | Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

Bio-Based Chemicals Project: Homegrown Electronics for All

Illinois grad student Kayla Vittore and undergraduate Jeff Taylor are growing several varieties of crop under varying nutrient treatments. Once grown, the plants will be harvested and analyzed for their lignin and cellulose content.

The world’s appetite for electronics is growing, but what happens when we are done with our old phones and tablets? Most electronics are not degradable, and their disposal contributes to a variety of environmental problems.

To help address this electronic waste problem, a University of Illinois research team led by D.K. Lee and Lisa Ainsworth is working to investigate the production and extraction efficiency of plant-based compounds that can be used to 3-D print biodegradable electronics. This research program, called the Bio-Based Chemicals Project, is part of a multi-institutional effort titled “Manufacturing ADvanced Electronics through Printing Using Bio-based and Locally Identified Chemicals (MADE-PUBLIC).” Funded by the National Science Foundation, MADE-PUBLIC is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together experts from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Iowa State University, and University of Illinois Chicago.

The MADE-PUBLIC team hopes to demonstrate a manufacturing paradigm that converts plant biomass into inks that can be used to print green electronic devices. Additionally, they aim to democratize the manufacturing of these electronic devices by enabling individuals to print their own devices.

“We’re using the lignin and cellulose content of plants to produce graphene and cellulose nanocrystals respectively,” said Kayla Vittore, a graduate student in Crop Sciences at Illinois and a member of the Bio-Based Chemicals Project’s operating team. “And those components can be used to make bio-based inks for a 3-D printing process that can produce biodegradable electronics.”

The Bio-Based Chemicals Project team is studying how a plant’s species and growth conditions influence its lignin and cellulose composition. This process will allow the team to determine the best conditions to produce bio-based inks.

To this end, Vittore is raising various plants, such as Miscanthus x giganteus, switchgrass, and fiber-industrial hemp, under different nutrient availability treatments. Once grown, the plants are harvested and analyzed. The research team is evaluating the plants’ cellular morphology, specifically the lignin and cellulose layers, to see if different nutrient treatments influence these structures. The ratios of lignin and cellulose are a determinant of both yield production and extraction efficiency, so these evaluations will inform the team’s strategies for optimizing the amount of bio-based ink that can be produced.

Among the biodegradable electronics that can be printed are precision agriculture sensors developed by the MADE-PUBLIC team. These electronics can be used to monitor the growth conditions of plants.

“We aim to create a closed production circle, where you can use plant products to make sensors that can monitor the air and water conditions important for plant growth,” said Lee, Co-PI of the Bio-Based Chemicals Project and Professor of Crop Sciences. “The sensors will allow users to optimize the plants’ production of lignin and cellulose, which can be used to produce more sensors and other biodegradable electronics. The goal of this project is to create renewable and accessible technology.”

The sensors, which are being developed with both small-scale home growers and large-scale factories in mind, can tell users information like “nitrogen is limiting growth” or “phosphorus is limiting growth.” Based on that information, users can apply fertilizers accordingly, which optimizes the system by increasing the amount of cellulose and lignin the plants produce.

The general public will have access to many different sensor designs to print. One exciting application of these sensors is for urban gardening. If someone is looking to address food deserts in cities, they would be able to print sensors to help them monitor the contents of the soil in their gardens.

In addition to helping growers and reducing electronic waste, MADE-PUBLIC also helps address the supply chain issues common in electronics manufacturing.

“If people are growing their own plants to produce the lignin and cellulose to print their own electronics, that’s a much shorter supply chain than the big systems we rely on right now,” Vittore said.

Shorter supply chains mean reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as there’s less travel involved. Additionally, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, longer supply chains are more apt to collapse when disrupted.

MADE-PUBLIC is made possible by the combined efforts of experts from a wide variety of fields and institutions. While researchers at Illinois — who became partners with the help of iSEE’s proposal development office — are working to increase the production and extraction efficiency of lignin and cellulose, MADE-PUBLIC collaborators from different institutions are working on other vital parts of the production cycle, such as producing the 3-D printable ink, designing the sensors, and 3-D printing the sensors and other electronics.

“It’s been fun working with people from different disciplines,” Vittore said. “We’re always learning new things from each other, which is a good opportunity to grow our communication skills. And leaning on each other’s different specialties allows us to do much more than we could as an independent lab.”

Said Lee: “I was very surprised. For many projects like this, the principal investigators will connect across institutions, but the grad students not so much. But the MADE-PUBLIC grad students have been very collaborative and good at communicating across institutes and disciplines.”

It’s easy to be cynical about electronic waste, but with so many passionate researchers putting their heads together to solve this problem, there is hope.

“We’re trying to give people and companies the tools so that when they have the resources to do so, they can make sustainable choices,” Vittore said. “Many 3-D printers use unsustainable materials, like plastics, but if there are alternatives available, people can choose a more renewable source. Making sustainability accessible goes a long way.”

For more information about MADE-PUBLIC, check out the multi-institutional project website >>>

— Article by iSEE Communications Specialist April Wendling

iSEE Receives $1M Gift to be Used for Low-Carbon Transportation Research

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) will catalyze research on sustainable transportation modes in the Midwest thanks to a $1 million gift from the 2019 settlement of a consumer class-action lawsuit.

“We will use the funding to invest in interdisciplinary research into holistic, next-generation transportation systems that sustainably and equitably serve the mobility needs of both urban and rural communities,” said Madhu Khanna, iSEE’s Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Chair & Director. “This new initiative is aimed to address a range of open questions related to infrastructure design and planning, energy sources, multi-modal service integration, effectiveness in reducing emissions and other environmental impacts, the economic and behavioral incentives to adopt alternative modes of transportation, and the design of policies needed to accelerate this transformation.

“The projects we fund will advance the frontiers of knowledge and be competitive for external funding.”

Energy consumption is by far the biggest source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for a whopping 73% worldwide — more than half of which stems from transportation, she said.

“The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has developed significant expertise in advanced biofuels from bioenergy crops that offer one possible solution to decarbonize transportation,” Khanna said. “We now aim to coalesce and channel the capacity to develop a portfolio of innovative approaches, including electric, autonomous, and hydrogen vehicles, ride-sharing, and other low-carbon transportation modes.”

The campus has experts who are uniquely poised to develop science-based tools for efficient next-generation mobility solutions, quantify economic and environmental benefits, and inform enabling policies. “We have a breadth of expertise across disciplines such as engineering, computing, economics, urban planning, and environmental sciences,” Khanna said, “and iSEE is well-positioned to team up these experts to creatively solve a complex societal challenge.”

iSEE, which received the gift in late Fall 2022, expects to announce a Request for Proposals to seed-fund this faculty-led research initiative in January 2023.

— iSEE Communications & Public Affairs Director Tony Mancuso

ASC Wins Grant to Quantify Phosphorus Leaching from Streambank Erosion

Andrew Margenot works at Polecat Creek, a tributary of the Embarras in Coles County, Ill., with severe bank erosion. Credit: Andrew Margenot

A team of Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) scientists was awarded a grant from the Illinois Nutrient Research and Education Council (NREC) to quantify streambank erosion across the state and its contributions to phosphorus (P) loading of surface waters.

Researchers will develop estimates of non-agricultural sources of P that leach into the Mississippi River, clarifying agricultural P contributions. The study will provide much-needed information for a 2025 milestone in the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS), the state’s plan to reduce P losses to the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.

Currently, the Illinois NLRS does not account for phosphorus from eroding streambanks, thereby incorrectly “counting” this nutrient load as an agricultural loss. Quantifying it will improve understanding of P loss sources from Illinois to the Mississippi River, and it should improve allocation of resources for nutrient loss mitigation.

The project, which will receive $851,049 over four years, is led by Andrew Margenot, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences and co-Associate Director of ASC; and Kaiyu Guan, Blue Waters Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) and Founding Director of ASC. Co-PIs include Shengnan Zhou, Research Scientist in Crop Sciences; Bruce Rhoads, Professor of Geographic Information Science; and Sheng Wang, Research Assistant Professor in NRES.

What is I-GUIDE? Check out our FAQ

In 2021, iSEE helped establish the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE), securing a $15 million, five-year grant through National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution. Five such institutes across the United States now explore questions at the frontiers of science and engineering.

Becky Vandewalle, a Geography Ph.D. student who works with the new center, and Primary Investigator Shaowen Wang, Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science and Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies (CyberGIS Center), offer answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the new initiative.

What is I-GUIDE?

The Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) is an interdisciplinary intercollegiate institute supported by the National Science Foundation that brings together people who are working on a wide variety of geospatial problems. I-GUIDE combines geospatial-related expertises and resources to achieve things that couldn’t be done individually.

There are many challenges to working with geospatial data. These challenges involve handling data, computing, finding people with the know-how to work with the data, getting ideas together, and figuring out what insights and solutions can be pursued. Geospatial problem solving is inherently interdisciplinary — it’s basically anything that’s got a geographic or spatial component. That’s the cool thing about this area: We are all doing geospatial work but using very different methods and data sources. This allows us to tackle these challenging problems because we have people looking at them with different perspectives.

What is GIS, and how is it used? What about cyberGIS?

GIS stands for “geographic information systems” or “geographic information science,” depending on the context.

GIS blends geospatial data with information technology and computer science to enable decision making and problem solving in numerous domains. It’s an umbrella term that looks at anything embedded in place and space, and then supports data-driven analysis and modeling.

The work on cyberGIS, which specifically focuses on synergizing GIS with cutting-edge advances in artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and high-performance computing has gone a long way to help figure out what we can do with I-GUIDE.

Why should the average person be interested in I-GUIDE?

I-GUIDE works at a high organizational level, but ultimately the goal is for the impacts to trickle down to make things better for people living in the real world.

We study ways to more holistically address some of these problems. You can study something through the lens of trade, or the lens of agriculture, for example. But cyberGIS gives us the integrative opportunity to tackle these problems holistically. Because of that, we can put together some really neat insights. It’s challenging, but also why it’s really cool.

Do you have an example of the work I-GUIDE does?

One example is aging dam infrastructure. There are tens of thousands of dams in the United States. We’re looking at U.S. dams made in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s — old ones. And a lot of them are now degrading because there hasn’t been active maintenance for them.

We can use I-GUIDE’s collaboration and capabilities to look at what kinds of things might signal which dams are vulnerable. We can develop methods to estimate where people could be affected by spillover effects if a dam fails. It’s not just that the dam can fail; it can hit the power infrastructure, it can hit the transportation system, it can hit people’s houses, and so much more. And if the power infrastructure gets affected by flooding caused by a dam failure, then that can cause other issues. A hospital might lose power, for example. So we estimate what might be the non-obvious risks if a dam fails. The interdisciplinary research enabled by I-GUIDE can go even further, and also address what factors can lead to dam failures, and how communities can work together to limit the impacts of such failures.

What are the main objectives and outcomes of I-GUIDE’s work? What are some examples of its impact?

I-GUIDE aims to enable practitioners and scientists from numerous disciplines to access data, run scientific models, and be able to innovate algorithms and gain insights from complex and massive data. Our new knowledge and experience will represent how advances of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing can invoke ethical and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles — regardless of the nature of the data type and its purpose — in the broad context of addressing a variety of sustainability challenges.

We have begun with topics of biodiversity loss and water and food insecurities, including aging dams, agricultural disruptions, extreme climatic events, and global-to-local-to-global modeling of trade, and we look to the broader community for collaborative work on additional challenges as well.

A key common theme within I-GUIDE is convergence science. For example, we want the people who focus on cyberinfrastructure innovation to directly work with domain scientists — the people harnessing the power of computing and data to pursue solutions to complex problems. Similarly, I-GUIDE fosters collaborations between those doing quantitative research and those doing qualitative research.

Then there’s also the aspect of communication. How do we take these research advances and communicate them to the people who need to hear them so that change can happen? That means we’re not only communicating to decision makers and practitioners, but lay people as well.

I-GUIDE often fosters collaboration spanning different domains. What do these interdisciplinary projects look like?

We have some team members who are very skilled with data analysis, some who are very skilled with high-performance computing, and some who are very skilled with cyberGIS. And then we have people focused on AI and machine learning, and we have others who are more focused on solving specific problems in particular domains spanning natural and social sciences. Everyone brings a different perspective and skillset to the table, which is critically needed to tackle diverse sustainability challenges

And that’s both a strength and a challenge. Different perspectives and skills mean that we’re prepared to solve diverse problems, but we must work hard to make sure everyone is on the same page.

How can people learn more about I-GUIDE and get involved if they’re interested in the work you’re doing?

There’s a “Contact Us” page on the I-GUIDE website. Additionally, if you’re close to Champaign-Urbana, you can physically walk in. We’re headquartered in the Natural History Building.

We’re always looking for students who are interested in solving real-world problems and passionate about innovating computing, data, and geospatial technologies for a better world.

Paul Mwebaze: Exploring ‘Agrivoltaics’ from the Ground Up

Paul Mwebaze likes American football, European football, and agrivoltaics. Let’s break that down if it’s confusing: the first is football, the second is soccer, and the third is integrating agricultural crops and solar panels on the same piece of land.

Mwebaze dedicates his days to iSEE’s Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems (SCAPES) project, studying the economic balance between agricultural and photovoltaic systems. SCAPES is a new project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at $10M over four years.

Mwebaze holds a master’s and Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics and has published papers in leading economics journals; he is also an active member of the International Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Drawn to Professor Madhu Khanna’s unparalleled reputation in environmental economics, Mwebaze came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to work with Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics (and iSEE Interim Director).

Together, PI and pupil work on SCAPES, which provides interdisciplinary scientific research, extension, and education about sustainable agrivoltaic technologies. These systems will increase the economic well-being and resilience of U.S. farmers by maintaining or — even enhancing — food production while also increasing renewable energy generation.

This research is important, they say, because the competition is increasing as to whether land should be used for agriculture or energy production.

“SCAPES will provide the science to help reduce this land-use competition,” Mwebaze said. “It will provide climate-smart solutions to improve crop water-use efficiency, profitability, economic resilience of agriculture, and land productivity — including both crop and electricity yield.”

Within this large goal, Mwebaze spends most of his day coordinating and managing the SCAPES project activities. He also collaborates with his teammates to research the economic implications of using land for food and energy production simultaneously, and he brainstorms with Khanna weekly.

Beyond collaboration within the U of I, the SCAPES team also extends to the University of Arizona, Auburn University, Colorado State University, the University of Illinois Chicago, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as the researchers explore different climates and land types.

“Research collaboration provides opportunities to learn how complementary disciplines can be applied to agrivoltaics to develop more innovative solutions,” Mwebaze said.

The fruits of the researchers’ labors will most pertinently benefit American farmers — increasing their yields and profits — but SCAPES will also improve local sustainability by educating the public and generating renewable power.

“The SCAPES project research-education-extension plan will facilitate adopting climate-smart agrivoltaic systems, leading to increased food and energy production and a more sustainable and resilient agricultural sector,” Mwebaze said.

The plan is robust, including fact sheets, a website, and educational programming. These resources will be updated regularly and disseminated to schools, summer camps, and museums.

Looking ahead, Mwebaze is totally focused on SCAPES. He is excited about applying for more funding to begin a potential second phase of the project.

“There is so much work to do in the agrivoltaic space now and in the future!” he said.

— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Maria Maring

USDA NIFA Funds ‘Farm of the Future’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that it is funding a new collaboration between two institutes and a research center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will create an integrated farm of the future in the U.S. Midwest.

Titled “I-FARM: Illinois Farming and Regenerative Management,” this $3.9 million, three-year project is funded through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The Illinois-led study will develop an 80-acre agricultural testbed, where commodity crops (corn and soybean) and livestock are farmed using synergistic and sustainable practices.

“We will accelerate creation, maturation, and adoption of new management technologies that are fundamentally more sustainable, profitable, affordable, and scale-neutral. The new practices will be enabled by maturing digital agriculture technologies developed in wide-ranging research efforts at the University of Illinois,” said Primary Investigator Girish Chowdhary, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering and Computer Science.

NIFA’s “Farm of the Future” proposal process was extremely competitive, and only one was awarded from across the nation, said Co-Investigator and Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) Co-Director Vikram Adve, the Donald B.Gillies Professor of Computer Science.

“This grant is a major endorsement of our growing strengths in digital ag,” Adve said.

The I-FARM is a unique partnership between CDA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the U of I. Over three years, the I-FARM testbed will feature improved precision farming with remote sensing; new under-canopy autonomous robotic solutions for cover-crop planting, variable-rate input applications, and mechanical weeding; and artificial intelligence-enabled remote sensing for animal health prediction, nutrient quantification, and soil health.

“With the data gleaned from this project, the MyFarm app will provide farmers with an integrated dashboard that can be customized to the needs of their farm,” Chowdhary said. “Our focus on scale-neutral technologies can provide a solution to the worsening labor crisis for small farms and improve the sustainability of large and spatially heterogeneous farms.”

I-FARM technoeconomic simulations and farmer surveys will clarify barriers and incentives to adoption of sustainable technology to industry and farmers. Integrated extension activities will be conducted in a research space that is open to farmers, with demonstrations and training, easing the adoption of new technologies and opening new markets. The I-FARM team will also help the ag industry create new data-driven products and services for farmers, and an Industry Advisory Board and a Farmer Advisory Board will help the optimize impact on farming practices.

“Together, this integrated suite of solutions will lead to sustainable ways of meeting growing demand for agriculture in a changing climate,” said Co-PI and iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics. “The CDA, iSEE, and NCSA built the strongest research proposal by reaching across disciplines and bringing together expertise from all over the University of Illinois — from computer science to economics to crop science and animal science, we are exploring as many aspects as possible as we seek to build a farm of the future.

“We look forward to a fruitful collaboration with this project — and similar multidisciplinary work in the future because it is the best way to solve most of the wicked problems this world will face.”

As the only “Farm of the Future” nationwide, “all eyes will be on this project as we lay the foundations for the future of agriculture,” Adve said. “We are excited to begin this venture and grateful for the support from across campus.”

Other U of I project members include Co-PI Kaiyu Guan, Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences and Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center; and Co-Investigators Isabella Condotta, Assistant Professor of Animal Sciences; Deepak Vasisht, Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Shadi Atallah, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics; Hamze Dokoohaki, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; Salah Issa, Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering; Andrew Margenot, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; DoKyoung Lee, Professor of Crop Sciences; and Bin Peng, Senior Research Scientist at iSEE and NCSA.

The Illinois team will partner with Olga Bolden-Tiller, Dean of the College of Agriculture, Environment and Nutrition Sciences and Professor of Animal Sciences, and Gregory Bernard, Assistant Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences, at Tuskegee University.

“This is an exciting time to embark on this project, and it is a credit to our team, their expertise, and the thriving research programs we can bring to bear,” said Chowdhary, who also holds affiliations with Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois. “I want to thank the institutes, CDA, our departments and colleges, and our Tuskegee partners for their help, the College of ACES for securing us the farm space, and especially those from the farming industry who graciously offered letters of support.”

Read the NIFA announcement >>>

— Article by Tony Mancuso, iSEE Communications and Public Affairs Director

U of I SMARTFARM Researchers Use Novel AI to Model GHG Emissions

Researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystems called KGML-ag, which includes less obvious variables such as soil water content, oxygen level, and soil nitrate content related to nitrous oxide production and emission. Credit: iStock

University of Illinois researchers were part of a multi-institutional team that has significantly improved the performance of numerical predictions for agricultural nitrous oxide emissions using novel modeling that combines artificial intelligence and process-based knowledge.

According to a release from the University of Minnesota — home of the corresponding author and Digital Agriculture Group lead Zhenong Jin — the team developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystem, called KGML-ag, which is 1,000 times faster than current solutions and also significantly improves the modeling accuracy of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

The research was recently published in Geoscientific Model Development. Researchers involved were from Minnesota, Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Pittsburgh. According to the Minnesota news release, KGML-ag was constructed by a special procedure that incorporates the knowledge learned from an advanced agroecosystem computational model, called ecosys, to design and train a machine learning model. In small, real-world observations, the KGML-ag turns out to be much more accurate than either ecosys or pure machine learning models.

“This is revolutionary work that brings together the best of observational data, process-based models, and machine learning by integrating them together,” said Kaiyu Guan, a coauthor of the study, Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and Blue Waters Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois. Guan is the Project Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management (SMARTFARM) project that funded the study.

“We are really excited to continue this collaboration with the University of Minnesota team led by Zhenong Jin to explore and realize the full potentials of KGML,” Guan said.

Jin, Assistant Professor of Agroecosystem Modeling at Minnesota, and Vipin Kumar, Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering at Minnesota, are co-authors who work on the SMARTFARM project led by Guan. ASC and SMARTFARM team member Bin Peng and ASC team member Wang Zhou, both from NRES at Illinois, also were among the article’s 16 authors. Guan and Peng are affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. ASC is a collaboration between the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation.

“There is a lot of excitement around the potential for agriculture to contribute to carbon drawdown, but unless we have accurate and cost-effective measurement tools to assess what is happening both above- and below-ground, we won’t see the market incentives we know are necessary to facilitate a transition to net-negative agriculture,” said David Babson, an ARPA-E Program Director. “I’m looking forward to the teams further expanding this research.”

Read the journal article in Geoscientific Model Development >>>

New estimation strategy improves soil carbon sampling in agricultural fields

Research Technician Michael Douglass and Postdoctoral Researcher Nan Li conducting deep soil coring for quantifying soil organic carbon stocks on a farm in Piatt County, Ill. Credit: Dan Schaefer

There is much more carbon stored in Earth’s soil than in its atmosphere. A significant portion of this soil carbon is in organic form (carbon bound to carbon), called soil organic carbon (SOC). Notably, unlike the inorganic carbon in soils, the amount of SOC, and how quickly it is built up or lost, can be influenced by humans. Since its advent about 10,000 years ago, agriculture has caused a significant amount of SOC to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change.

Quantifying the amount of SOC in agricultural fields is therefore essential for monitoring the carbon cycle and developing sustainable management practices that minimize carbon emissions and sequester carbon from the atmosphere to the soil to reduce or reverse the climate effects of agriculture.

“Accurate and efficient SOC estimation is essential,” said Eric Potash, a Research Scientist in the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and Department of Natural Resource & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Governments need to estimate SOC in order to implement policies to minimize climate change. Researchers need to estimate SOC to develop sustainable management practices. And farmers need to estimate SOC to participate in emerging carbon credit markets.”

The traditional and most reliable way to quantify SOC is by soil sampling, with analyses in the lab (“wet chemical” measurement). But which locations in the field should be sampled? And how many samples should be taken for an accurate estimate? Each additional soil core adds significant labor and expense — and uncertainties in how to optimize sampling can lead to substantial extra costs.

In a new publication from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SMARTFARM Project, Potash and other SMARTFARM researchers evaluated strategies for estimating SOC. Their goal was to develop an estimation strategy that maximizes accuracy while minimizing the number of soil cores sampled.

The SMARTFARM Project, a program led by co-author and Blue Waters Professor in NRES Kaiyu Guan and funded by the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), endeavors to develop a precise solution for measuring and quantifying greenhouse gas emissions and SOC change during the production of crops.

Research technician Michael Douglass operates a hydraulic probe for sampling soils for soil organic carbon stock assessment. Credit: Andrew Margenot

“We aim to collect gold-standard ground truth data and also to develop new technology to quantify field-level carbon outcomes for bioenergy crops, improving yield and also improving environmental sustainability,” said Guan, ASC Founding Director.

This work is made possible with unprecedented data collection effort.

“We have collected 225 soil samples at 3 samples per acre at one of the SMARTFARM sites. The samples were collected up to 1 meter deep using a Giddings probe. This level of dense sampling has never been done before,” said co-author DoKyoung Lee, a Professor of Crop Sciences, a co-PI of the SMARTFARM project, and also an ASC founding faculty member.

In this work, the researchers approached the problem by evaluating the two steps involved in estimating SOC: (1) deciding where in a field to take soil samples; and (2) deciding on a statistical rule for calculating an estimate (called an estimator). By using a commercial field in central Illinois that had been intensively sampled to measure SOC, a variety of strategies could be evaluated for their performance in estimating SOC in the field.

The researchers found that in a typical Midwestern agricultural field, they can leverage publicly available soil surveys and satellite imagery to efficiently select sample locations. This should reduce the number of samples needed to achieve a given accuracy of SOC quantification by about 28% compared to selecting sampling locations at random.

“For researchers and agencies monitoring SOC stocks, this study offers a strategy to increase accuracy, supporting cost optimization of sampling methods,” said co-author Andrew Margenot, Crop Sciences Assistant Professor and ASC Associate Director.

“Future studies can use these findings both as a benchmark against which to compare new SOC stock estimation strategies and as a demonstration of how to evaluate those strategies,” Potash said.

The research team is currently collecting data from many more fields to test the ability to generalize their findings — as well as to develop further improvements to SOC estimation strategies. Team members are also developing a software tool to make their improved sampling methods available to farmers and researchers.

In addition to Potash, Guan, Lee, and Margenot, co-authors on this publication include Evan DeLucia, ASC and Professor Emeritus of Plant Biology; Sheng Wang, ASC and NRES Research Assistant Professor; and Chunhwa Jang, Crop Sciences Postdoctoral Researcher. Read the full article in Geoderma >>>

ASC was jointly established by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment (iSEE), the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. NRES and Crop Sciences are in the College of ACES, and Plant Biology is in the School of Integrative Biology, part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Illinois.

— News release by April Wendling, iSEE Communications Specialist

Vikram Kumar: Seeking Sustainable Answers for Waste Residue

Vikram Kumar was always a bright student in elementary and high school, but he felt constrained by the lack of creativity he could engage in when doing schoolwork. Wanting instead to confront questions with undetermined answers, Kumar naturally gravitated toward research — which eventually led him to the Rapid AI-based Dissection of Ashes using Raman and XRF Spectroscopy (RADAR-X) Project.

“Everything had a correct answer in high school courses, and I did not have any responsibility to make things correct. I did not enjoy that,” Kumar said. “Research is the only place I can be responsible for answering questions that do not have an answer yet.”

Kumar began his pursuit of the unknown at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, where he received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. In spring 2020, he enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his master’s degree in civil engineering, and now he’s working on his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering with a specialization in construction materials.

“I came to UIUC for its top-ranked Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) program, and also for its tranquility,” Kumar said. “These components give UIUC an atmosphere that is unlike anywhere else in the world.”

Kumar is on the operating team for the RADAR-X Project, which finds end uses for municipal solid waste incineration ashes — residues left over from the incineration of trash. However, because researchers have no control over what is in the trash, the ashes can be extremely variable, and different types of ash lend themselves to different uses. So, the first step of RADAR-X is to understand the chemical characteristics of these residues. Then, researchers can identify specific end uses for each chemical composition, purify the ashes, and get to work on implementation.

End uses vary widely. For example, if the ash residue happens to have a high content of heavy metals or rare earth elements, such as aluminum, copper, iron, gallium, and dysprosium, those elements can be extracted and utilized, instead of being mined anew. Another example is cement production, an industry responsible for approximately eight percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Ashes may be integrated into cement mix, decreasing the need for raw materials.

The primary limiting factor in implementing ash end uses more conventionally is the variable composition of the ashes. Therefore, from a waste-to-energy facility’s standpoint, it is imperative that these ashes qualify for multiple end uses. The suitability of an ash for a specific use is dependent on its chemical composition. So, guidelines to determine end use from chemical composition must first be established. RADAR-X is addressing this hurdle by developing real-time characterization capabilities: spectroscopy-based analytical methods that will enable incineration facilities to determine ash’s chemical composition continuously every few minutes. In addition to RADAR-X’s objective to determine chemical composition in real time, the project will establish chemical composition-specific end use guidelines, benefiting waste-to-energy facilities in diverting ashes from landfills to industries that can employ the ashes as components for applications like cement.

In his day-to-day research, Kumar spends copious time in the lab. The RADAR-X team primarily does its work at the Nathan M. Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory on campus, and team members receive ashes from approximately 40 different incineration facilities throughout the U.S.

“My role is to understand the chemical characteristics of incineration ashes via spectroscopic methods,” Kumar said. “Then, I design pretreatment methods that make an ash of a specific chemical composition fit for multiple end uses.”

The spectroscopic methods RADAR-X uses to discover ashes’ elemental and mineralogical composition are X-ray fluorescence and raman spectroscopy, which identifies a sample’s elemental composition by using X-rays. When subjected to X-rays, elements respond by emitting photons in characteristic radiations. The concentration of a given element is directly related to the intensity of the characteristic radiation. By analyzing the emitted characteristic radiation, researchers determine the composition and concentration of elements present in the ash.

iSEE initially seed-funded CEE Assistant Professor Nishant Garg and the RADAR-X project in 2020. In 2021, Garg’s team received a $1 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), allowing the project to expand its scope.

“We will analyze the chemical characteristics of incineration ashes from all across the U.S.,” Kumar said. “For the next two years, we will work with these ashes at the lab scale; but later, we will test the developed real-time characterization capability at waste incineration facilities nationwide.”

RADAR-X has multifaceted sustainability benefits. First, it decreases landfill waste — the U.S. incinerates approximately 34 million tons of municipal solid waste every year, and then these residues are sent to a landfill. Second, reused ashes decrease the need for raw materials, reducing the necessity of environmentally-harmful mining operations.

“The successful implementation of RADAR-X will reduce our collective environmental footprint. The project is relevant to everyone, whether they know it or not,” Kumar said.

Looking toward the future, Kumar plans to stay in the research field, specifically focusing on “green” chemistry. Clearly, his fascination with the study of questions without answers has never waned.

“That’s the beauty of research: When it comes to things that nobody has ever thought about, we are all blank. We all have our own ways of thinking. In the end, it boils down to where you want to lead yourself.”

— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Maria Maring