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The Purpose of this Website Website Content
In the field as part my research into soil silicon stocks and cycling for the Kwiakah Nation in June 2025!
Learn more about the Kwiakah First Nation at kwiakah.com

Hi and Hello!

Welcome to AmyWells.ca!

My name is Amy Wells! I am a master's student in the SoilRES3 Lab at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Land and food Systems. My masters research has two areas of interest:

  1. First, how ancestral and industrial land management have impacted the stocks, and cycling of silicon (Si) within the soils of the Kwiakah First Nation
  2. Second, how the emerging technology of 3D Gaussian splat based radiance fields can be applied to the field of soil science, to enhance soil science education, science communication, and research support.

My research is being conducted under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Thomas Cornelis, and Dr. Maja Krzic.

This site, amywells.ca, was started to showcase UBC course work, and has since become a platform to showcase projects I am working on, including the Virtual Soils project, presentations I have done at conferences, and more!

It also serves as a testing ground for building my skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so if parts of the site are broken, or look like they're still in development, the odds are that its on the list of things to build on, and improve in future!

The Virtual Soils Project

An example of how PC-VR based radiance fields have been used for soil science communication in VRChat.

The Virtual Soils Project is a project I started to apply the emerging technology of radiance fields, starting with Neural Radiance Fields (Mildenhall et al., 2020), and now with 3D Gaussian splats (Kerbl et al., 2023) within the field of soil science.

I believe that radiance fields have potential within the field of soil science to:

  1. Enhance soil science education through the creation of exciting, and innovative teaching tools that center learners as active participants.
  2. Allow for more engaging science communication and outreach, particularly with community partners.
  3. Make soils accessible to all research participants, regardless of distance or logistical complexity.

Work to date on the project has focused on developing a standard method for consistently capturing soils with Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetric techniques, and the validation of this technique by myself.

Future work on this project will include (1) further validation of the capture method, (2) the publishing of the method and associated resources as an open-access academic paper, (3) the application of these reconstructed environments and soils for soil science education and science communication and more!

If you want to get in contact about the Virtual Soils project please email me at amys2001@student.ubc.ca!

A macro photo of Ablation Till from a monolith in the UBC Soil Monolith Collection.

Key Projects

There is a lot more of my work available on this website! The papers I have been a part of, conference presentations, event photography, and soil photos can all be found in the Key Projects section!

This section of the website is admittedly the part that still needs the most development, but my time has been primarily focused on my masters research.