Operational progression of digital soil assessment for agricultural growth in Tasmania, Australia

Tasmania, Australia, is currently undergoing a period of agricultural expansion through the development of new irrigation schemes across the State, primarily to stimulate the economy and ensure future food security. ‘Operational Progression of Digital Soil Assessment (DSA) for Agricultural Growth in Tasmania, Australia’ presents the adaptation and operationalisation of quantitative approaches for regional land evaluation within these schemes, specifically applied Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) to inform a land suitability evaluation for 20 different agricultural crops, and ultimately a spatial indication of the State’s agricultural versatility and capital. DSM had not previously been applied or tested in Tasmania; the research examines and validates DSM approaches with respect to the State’s unique and complex soils and biophysical interactions with climate and terrain, and how these apply to various agricultural land uses. The thesis is a major contribution to the methodology and development of one of the first major operational DSA programs in Australia, and forms a framework for this type of DSM approach to be used in future operational land evaluation elsewhere

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead