Funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Project period: 2023-2024

Project staff: Tom Janetzek

Cooperations: 

• FlyPard Analytics GmbH
• inovex GmbH 

Microorganisms in soils play a major role in a variety of processes: they significantly determine soil fertility and influence plant health, decompose residual materials, release minerals and clean up water. Microorganisms take effect in material cycles such as carbon- and nitrogen cycle and are of central meaning of the fixation and release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Therefore, soil microorganisms have a direct influence on food production, health and climate and are thus essential for human life.

Microorganisms live in complex communities. A high biodiversity of this communities is often evidence of a healthy and intact ecosystem. However, measurements of microbial communities in the environment require specific equipment and analysis and plenty of expert knowledge and is thereby expensive and time-consuming. The continuous development in the field of remote sensing now enables for measuring many soil parameters on global scale. These parameters together with the increasing number of available microbial datasets offer the opportunity to effectively determine the diversity and composition of microbial communities using artificial intelligence (AI) on large scale. The goal of MikroKIez is to develop an AI model that predicts microbial communities and their diversity based on environmental parameters, on a global level. MikroKIez will lay the foundation of many new applications, though focusing on large scale monitoring of our soil quality on agricultural land and the prediction of microbial greenhouse gas emission.