LFS Learning Centre Speaker Series: Amy Wells on Making Soils More Accessible with Radiance Fields

Advancements in digitally reconstructing real-world environments provide an opportunity to make the global diversity of soil alongside their environmental context accessible on the web, and within immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences!

Join online to learn about the technology, how it works, and to have any questions answered! Following that join for an in-person demonstration the of VR concept in MCML 102A!

Amy Wells is a 2nd year master’s student in the SoilRES3 Lab at the University of British Columbia. She is studying how industrial land management, and ancestral land stewardship have affected the stocks and cycling of soil silicon within forest ecosystems, as well as how the emerging technology of 3D Gaussian splat-based Radiance Fields can be applied to enhance soil science education, and science communication. Amy graduated from the UBC Sustainable Agriculture and Environment program in May 2024, following work done on how the UBC Farm benefited from a long-term student generated soil data set. She hopes to further develop new methods for communicating soil science and its research with community partners, students, and the broader public with the hope of inspiring others to learn more about soil.

Amy is co-supervised by Dr. Maja Krzic and Dr. Jean-Thomas Cornelis in the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

For more information on the LFS Learning Centre Speaker Series, visit https://lc.landfood.ubc.ca/speaker-series/