An overlooked education and research asset of the university is its involvement in the state soil survey, in which soils were mapped across Illinois beginning in the early 1900s. Soils collected collected throughout the 20th century as part of the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Soil Survey effort are stored, albeit in poor conditions and in neglect, at the university campus farms.

This project plans to restore, digitize, and make open-access this historical resource for educational and research purposes, reinforcing the University of Illinois' position as a leader in agricultural and environmental sciences. Importantly, we believe that this resource and its lessons should be made accessible to the public. To achieve this goal, a graduate student-led undergraduate team mentored by the PI's will conduct a restoration and archiving effort to rescue and digitize the samples and data of this centennial soil archive.

The specific outcomes of this work include: 1) Provide undergraduate students hands-on and practical experience through including them from the start of the project. This will include assistance with standard operating procedure development for inventorying samples and collecting new samples. 2) Enable testing of fundamental questions on the sustainability of agriculture in Illinois and the greater US Midwest by having a window back in time to how soil fertility has changed over the past century. Though a plurality of questions can be answered, for this work we will start by measuring carbon in these archived soils in order to establish a historical sequence of soil carbon changes and thus sequestration deficits and potential in Illinois. 3) Offer a platform for University undergraduate and graduate students to pursue student-focused research funding such as the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) proposal as well as NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). Additionally, faculty will benefit by being able to leverage this resource for future studen-focused projects. 4) Restore and steward a valuable resource of our land grant university that is unique in the United States, which can be used in future student and faculty learning opportunities via classroom and student-focused projects. 5) Build a database for 'big picture' questions in environmental sciences, geospatial statistics, and agricultural sciences for use in the classroom. 6) Establish an open-access, online database that will capitalize on this unique historical archive to enable additional students and researchers from other land grant universities. 7) Publicize and disseminate findings and open-access database, both on-campus through a seminar and panel discussion, and off-campus by public outreach events in Chicago at the Chicago Field Museum and the Good Food Expo.