Thank you. That's an excellent question and one that we are certainly grappling with as a discipline. When I think about how we can best address this challenge, there are a few key components I would speak to.
The first is with respect to having some clear standards in place. As an example, when we talk about measuring soil carbon, we want to make sure that we have a clear understanding of how we can standardize those measurements across a region. Right now, I do a study. Dr. Caron does a study, and maybe one of our colleagues in Alberta does a study. We need to make sure those are comparable to each other in terms of how we are doing them and the methodologies we use and that there is that standardization.
A second piece is to be able to actually collect that data. It's a little bit like crowdsourcing our results. One approach would be to go out to do a widespread sampling of absolutely everything, but you would need to take into account that spatial and temporal variability and the temporal piece. It's not like we could do this all in the space of a month across the whole country. There would be temporal variability as we moved through that. It's thinking about how we can consolidate some of this data together. We have more and more technology now, computational techniques that allow us to work with large datasets. That type of work is also essential.
A third piece, and I know a number of my colleagues work in this space, is coming up with methodologies that allow us to do more rapid assessments. There are new spectroscopic techniques constantly emerging and being tested. I'm probably approached every month by companies wanting us to collaborate with them on a new technology they're developing. The key there relies on being able to link it back to some of that high-quality in situ data to start with, so having a proper soil database so you can build what we refer to as a spectroscopic library. There again, with the spectroscopic library, if we're going to use some of these new techniques, you need regionally specific databases. The one that works here in Saskatoon would look different from what would work best around Winnipeg. If we're going to move to some of these new techniques we're hearing about, we need to be able to build all of this data together.
There are projects getting rolling in that space. I think one of roles the federal government can play in this is finding ways for regions to work more effectively together. You have the benefit of that bird's eye view that looks across the country, so creating opportunities for us to transcend some of those boundaries and work more effectively together, and in particular, through some of those opportunities to consolidate data and practices. It's prioritizing that.
Sometimes when you submit a grant, it doesn't look particularly exciting, for example, to be measuring carbon after carbon in a sample, but it is through the building of that database and the organization of that important data that we're able to identify some of those larger patterns. Being able to link that as well with some of the key management data is where we're going to find those great learnings. As an example, when we think about that prairie soil carbon balance study I referred to earlier, one of the challenges they had was in between measurement periods. They would go back every few years, and if the land had changed hands in between sampling dates, there might be a loss of some of that management history data, whether it's the cropping rotations or if there was a disease outbreak or something else happened in that field that might have affected the results.
That's what we need to be able to fully address this. Data management, while it might not sound particularly interesting, is absolutely essential to really get at some of these underlying questions.