Researcher Spotlight
Yushu Xia
Yushu Xia is a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. with Professor Michelle Wander at UIUC. Her research lab utilizes field, lab, and remote sensing datasets along with modeling tools to monitor soil health, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecosystem productivity. Her finer-scale research aims to help farmers improve precision agriculture, while her broader-scale research aims to benefit policymaking by improving the accuracy and reducing the uncertainty of estimates associated with ecosystem services.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository?
I have always believed in the concept of open research, and I strive to make all the datasets and modeling tools generated from my research to be publicly available. To achieve better confidence in adopting improved soil management as a natural climate solution, we need to improve the quantification of various soil ecosystem service outcomes under different climate and management scenarios using modeling tools. However, models can never be accurate enough without using on-the-ground datasets for calibration and validation. Open datasets can help alleviate the data gaps that the soil modeling community is faced with.