World Inventory of Soil Emission Potentials (WISE) -- Development of a global soil dataset
Context
The WISE project has developed homogenized sets of soil data relevant for a wide range of environmental studies at global scale - agro-ecological zoning, assessments of crop production, soil vulnerability to pollution, soil carbon stocks and change, and soil gaseous emission potentials (see: WISE-related publications; data sets).
The project was implemented by ISRIC for the Dutch National Research Programme on Global Air Pollution and Climate Change (NRP Project 851039) [1991-1996]; it involved collaboration with numerous institutions and individuals worldwide.
Follow-up activities, with IIASA and FAO (PDF) and IFPRI (PDF), were aimed at deriving derived soil properties for the soil units of the World.
From 2002 onwards, ISRIC has been maintaining a compact 'in-house working set' of the WISE profile database (ver. 2.0), primarily to fill gaps in primary SOTER databases (PDF1, PDF2).
Methodology
Prior to developing the structure of the WISE database, the major soil factors needed for a wide range of global environmental studies were reviewed. The selected attributes may be considered in three groups: general information, physical and chemical soil data. These attributes, which are common to both the European Soil Database, SOTER, and the Global Soil Profile Database developed for the Data and Information System (DIS) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), appear to have gained wide support amongst the scientific community.
The ISRIC-WISE database is comprised of spatial and attribute data. The soil geographic component, with a spatial resolution of 0.5 by 0.5 degree, was derived from the 1:5 million scale FAO-Unesco Soil Map of the World. Each terrestrial grid cell may consist of up to 10 differerent soil units. The attribute data are comprised of a selection of globally distributed, legacy soil profiles considered to be representative for the 106 soil units of the Soil Map of the World.
The available selection of soil profile data have been used to generate lists of derived soil properties for each FAO soil unit, clustered by soil depth and soil textural class, using taxotransfer procedures (more ...). These parameter estimates, which should be seen as global default values, can be linked to spatial data derived from the digital Soil Map of the World by taking into account the full map unit composition; see data sets.
Example of WISE-derived secondary data (0.5 x 0.5 degree grid)
Further information: Niels H Batjes