Speaker
Description
Discoveries in soil chemistry have benefited human health by enhancing our food, water, and air quality and remediating contaminated soils and waters. Soil chemical principles-based discoveries have been deployed and adopted to solve agricultural and environmental problems, including developing new fertilizer technologies and science-based-management practices to improve fertilizer-use efficiency. Although tremendous improvements have been made in this area in recent decades, nutrient overloading causes environmental concerns at multiple scales. Also, the global scarcity of nutrients, such as phosphorus, is expected to be one of the most significant barriers to food production in the near future. To remedy this issue, extensive research has been conducted on increasing plant acquisition efficiency of nutrients applied to the soil. As a result, various commercial fertilizer sources and co-additives have been developed with the intention of controlling the reaction products of nutrients in the soil through the alteration of dissolution and other reaction pathways. Synchrotron X-ray-based techniques, such as bulk XAS and spatially resolved micro-XRF and micro-XAS, serve as a direct way to probe nutrient speciation at the point of application and in the bulk soil. Combining wet chemical, imaging, and spectroscopic techniques can enhance our understanding of reaction products and pathways with less uncertainty, facilitating the development of next-generation fertilizers better tuned to plant needs.
