When measuring soil carbon sequestration, there will be anomolies. For example biochar soil additives are becoming more common, and will result in powdered carbon granules in the soil. Though technically these are increases in the carbon level of the soil and should be beneficial to plant growth, they do not represent new carbon sequestration. In terms of a carbon credit schedule, soil additives don’t count.

We believe there are techniques which can distinguish soil additives from biological carbon content based on their physical and electrical properties. By reporting all of the raw measurements back for processing, we expect to be able to apply both normal analysis techniques as well as machine learning across the whole corpus of data to flag unusual results.

An advantage of performing the analysis in the datacenter is that old data can be re-analyzed using new techniques. If results are suspect, whether innocuous or deliberate, older measurements from that property can be re-analyzed to try to determine when the anomalies began.