ARGENTINA – 16 soil laboratories operating in various regions of Argentina gathered at the Anguil Agricultural Experimental Station in La Pampa with an aim of aligning the national protocols for soil analysis with the globally recognized standard operating procedures (SOPs) of FAO and its Global Soil Partnership.
The laboratories will implement the SOPs through one of its seven technical network: The Global Soil Laboratory Network (GLOSOLAN) to enhance the comparability and reliability of soil data across borders.
This was part of the broader efforts of the Argentinian Network of Soil, Water, and Plant Laboratories (RILSAV), which consists of 30 laboratories affiliated with the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).
RILSAV is a member of both GLOSOLAN and its regional counterpart for Latin America and the Caribbean, LATSOLAN.
The meet-up allowed participants to analyze and test the robustness of the different procedures, both in relation to the interpretation of the text and its implementation in the laboratory.
This is an essential step to advance with the comparison between the national and the global standard protocols.
The meeting was attended by representatives of those RILSAV laboratories committed to participating in a collaborative PT exercise, which involves the use of the different procedures simultaneously. Authorities from INTA, IRAM and GLOSOLAN were also present.
Argentinian standards were compared with the corresponding GLOSOLAN SOP. The comparison focused on the following key soil parameters.
They include: oxidizable organic carbon by the Walkley and Black method, nitrogen by the Kjeldahl method, extractable phosphorus by the Bray-Kurtz I and Olsen methods, exchangeable basic cations and cation exchange capacity extracted with ammonium acetate at pH 7.
The observations collected helped define the critical points of each technique and addressed any potential issues that could arise when implementing the procedures.
Finally, participants agreed on the procedural details to be adopted for the next PT schemes, which will enable Argentinian laboratories to collect information on the dispersion of results obtained with the different procedures.
This will provide elements for developing pedotransfer functions, facilitating the correlation between national standards and GLOSOLAN SOPs.
With the launch of GLOSOLAN in 2017 and its activities on the harmonization of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and the inter-laboratory comparisons (PTs) launched at global and regional levels, laboratories demanded for a comparison between the information obtained with the national protocols developed in Argentina and the globally harmonized protocols published by GLSOLAN.
