THE CREA SOIL ARCHIVE, A NATIONAL COLLECTION FOR ITALY. Exposing a tool to access physical sample and digital data

The Archive’s soil specimens are invaluable time capsules for assessing temporal changes in soil properties”. Physical samples are a basic element for reference, study,
and experimentation in research. There is an urgent need for better integrating these physical objects into the digital research data ecosystem, both in a global and in an
interdisciplinary context to support scientific reuse.
The CREA collection, located at the Experimental Farm of Fagna, Scarperia (FI), stores specimens and associated metadata. It covers all major agricultural and forestry
soil landscapes in Italy for organic and mineral horizons. Parameters include water impedance, rooting depth, stoniness, Coarse fraction, particle size, pH, organic carbon,
and total carbonates, World Reference Base classification. Part of collected samples was recently received and is temporarily stored unordered.
With the present work, a tool was developed to expose both metadata, digital research data, displacement to support FAIR principles. The tool was developed by means
of Ms Power BI. The original local Ms Access database was stored on the cloud and connected to the tool to allow automatic updates. Geographic and semantic queries
are graphically implemented through drop-down menus and pie charts on administrative units; Soil districts; European Environments; Land use; WRB; and Project.
The tool expose data collected by 13 different projects from 1986 to 2017. Contains 13,231 analyzed observations (pedological profiles, minipits,
or augerings) for a total of 33,523 samples. Soil properties resulted in ranging for Clay: 0.1-93.5 (29,9 average); Sand: 0.0-99.4 (17.9), pH (water):
3.9-9.7 (7.5); Organic carbon: 0.0-53.4 (7.8); Total carbonates: 0.0-91.4 (5.5) for the whole dataset. Textural composition of every Reference Soil
Group (24 out of 32) is presented as Bar Histogram. A navigation panel allows to preview the site location and storing collocation.
Although samples access is restricted, data and storing displacement are exposed to support use of the data and specimen's reuse. The
developed tool represents a first attempt to expose both metadata, soil data and filtering capabilities.