Mapping soil, losing ground? Politics of soil mapping
Cartographier les sols : agendas, infrastructures et relations de pouvoir
Résumé
Kon Kam King and Céline Granjou document the evolution of soil mapping since the 1960s at the French National Institute of Research on Agriculture (INRA). They account for the shift from soil surveying initiatives to the rise of soil digital mapping projects, including monitoring, modeling, and predicting soil quantitative properties, such as carbon content, at the global scale. Authors suggest that, as computer scientists reconceptualize soil as the underground part of the global environment monitored by earth system models and global change sciences, soil as a local and situated object of study and concern for pedologists tends to be lost from sight.