ICPA - Technical & Research Capabilities

Research Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry

ICPA Bucharest

TECHNICAL & RESEARCH CAPABILITIES

The most important ICPA technical and research capabilities include:

Highly skilled staff (soil scientists, agrochemists, agronomists, physicists, chemists, ecologists, biologists, information technology experts, GIS and RS experts);

Information on national soil and land resources (databases and maps, most of them unique in Romania):

Geographical Information System for Soil and Land Resources Management

(at different scales, e.g. 1:10,000, 1:200,000, 1:500,000, 1:1,000,000),

Soil and Agricultural Land Resource Management databases and maps - at the scale 1:50,000 (at the national level) and 1:10,000 (about 40% of the country agricultural area),
Soil Profiles databases (about 4,200 profiles, most of them described by about 500/1000 parameters),
Nation-wide base soil maps (at 1:10,000; 1:50,000; 1:200,000; 1:500,000 and 1:1,000,000 scale),
Nation-wide thematic soil maps (for soil erosion, waterlogging, salinity & sodicity, and land capability),
Database of the nation-wide monitoring of the quality of the soils (about 1000 soil profiles, 16x16 km grid),
Database of the yearly monitoring of the main quality parameters of the soils (district/nation-wide level),
Database of the pedo-geochemical parameters,
Map of the microzones,
Map of the ecoregions,
etc;

Controlled glasshouses and growth chambers;

Analytical facilities for soil plant and fertilisers chemistry, soil physics, soil mineralogy and soil micromorphology (Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer, Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, Gas chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer, High Performance Liquid Chromatograph, Gas Chromatographic System with Capillary Columns and Selective Detectors, Microcoulorimeter and other equipment of high performance);

General computing capabilities: personal computers (Pentium), general-purpose software, including DBMSs (Oracle, Paradox);

GIS and RS processing capabilities:

hardware: SUN Sparc-20 (64 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, 5 GB Tape Streamer), 2 digitizers (0.02" accuracy), colour plotter A1, colour printer A3, 19" monitors;
software: Arc/Info (1 license for 3 users on workstation, 1 license on PC), GRASS, TNTlite;

In-house software applications: yield prediction models, soil water balance models, expert system for land evaluation, expert system for basic soil tillage, fertiliser application models, computer aided diagnosis of mineral nutrition deficiencies for main crops, experiment-oriented statistical processing, different applications on the GIS and databases, etc.

ICPA Glasshouse

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