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Artificial intelligence enables mobile soil analysis for sustainable agriculture

For optimizing production yield while limiting negative environmental impact, sustainable agriculture benefits greatly from real-time, on-the-spot analysis of soil at low cost. Colorimetric paper sensors are ideal candidates for cheap and rapid chemical spot testing. However, their field application requires previously unattained paper sensor reliability and automated readout and analysis by means of integrated mobile communication, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing technologies. Here, we report such a mobile chemical analysis system based on colorimetric paper sensors that operates under tropical field conditions. By mapping topsoil pH in a field with an area of 9 hectares, we have benchmarked the mobile system against precision agriculture standards following a protocol with reference analysis of compound soil samples. As compared with routine lab analysis, our mobile soil analysis system has correctly classified soil pH in 97% of cases while reducing the analysis turnaround time from days to minutes. Moreover, by performing on-the-spot analyses of individual compound sub-samples in the field, we have achieved a 9-fold increase of spatial resolution that reveals pH-variations not detectable in compound mapping mode. Our mobile system can be extended to perform multi-parameter chemical tests of soil nutrients for applications in environmental monitoring at marginal manufacturing cost.