[Terrapreta] Charcoal Specs: important new proposition

[Kevin Chisholm]

Dear Christelle

ch braun wrote:
> Dear Kevin,
> 
> Thank you very much for your answer.
> Could you please give me more precisions about the Test Protocols you 
> are thinking about, and which form this should take concretely ?

I don't have a specific protocol or procedure in mind, for outlining a 
Test Program. Perhaps it would be impossible to define a specific 
procedure for running Terra Preta Tests.

Consider, for example, the three year test with Terra Preta in Africa, 
as reported by Christoph Steiner, the test work now under way by Richard 
Haard in Oregon, and the test work now under way by Dr. Reddy in India, 
where a major objective of his work is to grow a crop in an alkaline 
soil . These are three very different tests, at different times, in 
different climates, with different plants, by different people, with 
different objectives, etc. How could one specify a protocol or procedure 
for running these tests? OR, when analyzing the "final report" on these 
tests, what data should be extracted  from the reports for inclusion in 
teh data base? How could this data be included in the data base, in a 
manner where meaningful comparisons could be made??

Comparing such different tests may be difficult to impossible. However, 
in some respects, it would be easy, in that all three people are very 
methodical, have a scientific background, and write a good report. At 
least the reported results could be relied upon as being accurate, and 
from that they could then be judged for appropriateness for inclusion in 
the data base.

  Would
> it be enough to define every such protocol as a subset of mandatory 
> parameters taken from the charcoal specification, whose value have to be 
> given and/or measured (while others are optional) ? Is that what you mean ?

That is not what I meant, but I think it is an excellent idea!! With 
some such mandatory parameters, at least the tests could be grouped by 
the nature of the charcoal used for the tests.

> So for instance defining a protocol focusing on the influence of the 
> temperature for which a restricted subset of parameters would have to 
> comply with some predefined values (feedstock, carbo method...)  while 
> the values of another specific subset (yield,  chemical composition...)  
> would have to be measured by the experimenter for different specific 
> values of the temperature ?

Data like this would probably give more insight into what is the best 
kind of charcoal to use for Terra Preta, rather than how well TP 
performs in comparison to a non-TP soil. However, this itself would be 
very valuable, in that as far as I know now, nobody knows the best kind 
of charcoal for TP
> 
> Concerning the benefits of computer analysis (statistical analysis, data 
> mining...) performed on such databases, I found an abstract which 
> reflects quite well what I am thinking about:
> " Agriculture is an information-intensive industry from an essential 
> point of view. Many factors such as soil, fertilizer, temperature, 
> precipitation, sunray, etc. are all affect harvest, so that information 
> about them is carefully investigated by expert persons in deciding 
> agricultural activities. We thus expect to build an intelligent 
> agricultural information system to assist the experts and to help an 
> improvement on agricultural technologies [7]. Towards this purpose, we 
> firstly need to provide a system which can reveal hidden relations among 
> agricultural factors. Although traditional statistical methods have 
> already applied to this field, we expect recent data mining technologies 
> to bring still more fruitful results. In particular, an expert can 
> easily examines IF - THEN style rules extracted by the typical data 
> mining methods [1,6], he then may give further investigations around the 
> rules with existing knowledge."
> http://www.springerlink.com/content/p10lrdnvck6qfrl8/

This is a great concept, and it can be done, but it relies on accurate, 
meaningful, comparable data. This is where the correct protocol or test 
procedure comes in... it would help greatly in ensuring that teh results 
attained were comparable.
> 
> And maybe also this one, where they apparently managed to build a model 
> with which they could deduce the behavior of the yield of a crop as a 
> function of the physical- chemical soil properties:
> http://asae.frymulti.com/abstract.asp?aid=8328&t=2 
> <http://asae.frymulti.com/abstract.asp?aid=8328&t=2>
> 
> Doesn't that sound GREAT ??

This is great also, and such models can be built, as long as the input 
data is meaningful.

It would appear that a protocol or procedure outlining the data from a 
full "TP growing test" could be large and complex. I like your idea of 
focusing at least in part on getting very good data on the charcoal used 
in the test. Perhaps that would be a very good place to start, and when 
you had a good "charcoal data base", you could then expand it to a "TP 
Growth Test Data Base."
> 
> Sincerely yours,
> Christelle
> 
> 
> On 9/12/07, *Kevin Chisholm* <kchisholm at ca.inter.net 
> <mailto:kchisholm at ca.inter.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Dear Christelle
> 
>     A major benefit to your proposed data base system could be that it
>     contributes to standardization of a Test Protocol. Many people in many
>     places are conducting many tests with different purposes and under
>     different conditions.
> 
>     Consider any specific test... probably if the circumstances, conditions
>     and results were reported and discussed in detail, the report could be
>     perhaps 5 to 20+ pages long.  It might be difficult to capture all the
>     subtleties of each test in a data base.
> 
>     The Data Base could be set up in a way that would be helpful to
>     Experimenters in setting up their experiments.. "This is the data the
>     Data Base needs, so I will set up my experiment to be sure I capture
>     that data." Additionally, I would guess that many of us on the TP List
>     might not be familiar with Experimental Design and Statistical
>     Interpertation of Data. You might include URL's for good sites for
>     these
>     topics.
> 
>     Your proposed DB could thus be very beneficial to indirectly upgrading
>     "Biochar Science."
> 
>     Best wishes,
> 
>     Kevin
> 
>     ch braun wrote:
>      > Hello,
>      >
>      > I thought a little bit more about "BiocharDB" and the idea of
>     setting up
>      > an online DB of charcoal experiments.
>      > I read again your different comments, and actually I think it is
>     worth
>      > distinguishing between 2 different issues:
>      >
>      > 1. Developing a charcoal specification, i.e. a "standard" format for
>      > recording the experiments
>      > 2. Developing an online public DB to show these experiments to
>     the world
>      > (or to a restricted specific group of people).
>      >
>      > I am now actually pretty afraid that everything fails due to 2.
>     In my
>      > opinion, 1. would be helpful for anybody, because it would allow to
>      > define and store much more easily new experiments, as well as
>     retrieving
>      > much more efficiently results from old trials. So basically I
>     only see
>      > benefits for that. Of course, data still needs to be filled in
>     manually,
>      > but that is the case anyway whatever the format, and so finally
>     there is
>      > only the very small burden of having to learn a "new" format
>     which, I
>      > guess, cannot take an easier and more "user-friendly" aspect than
>     a form
>      > to complete.
>      >
>      > So my idea now is to provide facilities ( i.e. a small software)
>     which
>      > would allow any user to register easily his experimental data
>     according
>      > to the standard format ON HIS COMPUTER. That would basically
>     consists of
>      > fulfilling a form and having the tool automatically convert the
>     data in
>      > XML.
>      > That would remain LOCAL on the computer, NO connection to the
>     web, NO
>      > shared data. Just store your data for yourself more efficiently.
>      >
>      > This would be the first step. Once your experiments are stored in a
>      > uniform format, add-on tools could be easily developed to make
>     analysis,
>      > statistical calculations and try to find correlations between the
>      > results. YOUR results. I think that this may reveal some unnoticed
>      > relations, even between small sets of experiments, which
>     justifies the
>      > conversion.
>      >
>      > So who would be (really) interested by such a tool ?
>      >
>      > Again I can for now only see benefits actually, except the need
>     maybe to
>      > "migrate" the data and to learn something new, which as I said can
>      > really be reduced to a minimal overhead. Do you see other
>     problems ? In
>      > particular, I would be very interested to know why people would be
>      > reluctant to adopt such a standard.
>      >
>      > Then, a public online DB of experiments such as the one we discussed
>      > (see the draft http://bionecho.org/terrapreta/) would be a
>     complement to
>      > this effort, giving the possibility for motivated users to share
>     their
>      > experimental data in order to build a much larger repository
>     which would
>      > hopefully contribute to the whole research community working on
>     biochar.
>      > But the disclosure of the results would be TOTALLY independent
>     from the
>      > adoption of the standard to register one's data.
>      >
>      > Waiting for your comments...
>      >
>      > Sincerely yours,
>      > Christelle
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      >
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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