Keith D Shepherd & Ermias Betemariam

Behavioural Risk Factor and Outcome Surveillance for

Effective Soil Health Interventions

Integrating Household Surveys with Geospatial and Big Data Sources: Applications for Scalability

UN World Data Forum

15 - 18 January 2017 Cape Town, South Africa

Soil ecosystem services - under threat

Land Health Surveillance & Response

Shepherd KD, et al. 2015. Land health surveillance and response: a framework for evidence-informed land management. Agricultural Systems 132: 93–106

Land Health - the capacity of land, relative to its potential, to sustain delivery of essential ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems)

Land health surveillanceDevelop and promote methods for measuring and monitoring land health, assessing land health risks, and targeting interventions to improve agro-ecosystem health and human wellbeing

Risk framework

Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance

Key information needs

1. Quantitative relationships between outcomes and risk factors

2. Change in risk factors over time

Once you know the relationships then just need to monitor behaviour:• Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance

• Activity surveys; telephone interviews; crowd-sourcing

• E.g. World Bank LSMS surveys

New advances in soil health monitoring

• Low cost data from sensors – lab, field, space

• Data integration• Machine learning

Africa Soil Information Service

Improving small-holder Agricultural statistics through the integration of soil health data into the household socio-economic panel surveys

Land and Soil Experiment Research (LASER): Ethiopia and Uganda

Importance:• Quantify relationships between risk factors

and soil health• Monitor risk factors

8

• Household socio-economic data• Subjective assessment of soil quality

• Soil sampling• Objective assessment of soil quality

Survey Design and data collection

Soil spectroscopy Rapid Low cost Reproducible Predicts many soil functional properties

9

Lab Analyses

10

Soil properties

Lessons learnedMethodological improvements in smallholder agricultural statistics enables better decision making

Spectral soil analysis a feasible option to improve soil quality data

Panel samples of soil health of farm plots can be directly linked to household survey data

Demonstrated feasibility of simultaneously quantifying soil health, risk factors and human wellbeing