Carbon Dot-Based Smart Soil with Automatically Adjustable Porosity and Aggregate Size

With the world's population expanding rapidly, modern agriculture is evolving at a swift pace, leading to a significant increase in food production, primarily through the use of chemical fertilizers. However, this heavy reliance on fertilizers has led to issues such as soil compaction and decrease of earthworm abundance. Herein this study reports a smart soil consisting of conventional soil and carbon dots (CDot) based smart material which is capable of automatically adjusting its porosity and soil aggregate size. Due to the responsiveness, The CDot-based smart soil can lift its height up to 150% upon humidity stimulation due to the increased porosity which is similar to the effect caused by earthworms. Based on this effect, this smart soil can increase the growth rate of maize seedlings by 40%, thus showing great potentials in agriculture.