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ISRIC ― World Soil Information Database

Since its beginnings in 1966, ISRIC - World Soil Information has built up a collection of more than 20 000 articles, reports, books and maps, various digital databases and thousands of pictures in the fields of soils, land resources and management. During the past couple of years, more than 5000 of our maps have been scanned as a foundation for the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM), an ongoing collaborative project with the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES), Joint Research Centre (JRC), of the European Commission; this collection is available on-line and on DVD.

The functionality of the ISRIC - World Soil Information Database is being improved in collaboration with Wageningen UR Library. New features include: on-line access to over 3700 digital maps that can be down-loaded at high resolution and viewed on screen with a zoom facility; over 900 full-text reports in PDF format; country-specific searches based on Google maps, as well as basic and advanced searches; and a pull-down menu that gives links related to soil science.

Information about our scanned reports (Fig. 1) and maps (Fig.2) may be found through an Advanced Search, by ticking-off the appropriate boxes.

Fig. 1. Example of a description for a soil report linked to a full text report and a zoomable map
 

Fig. 2. Example of map description with a link to a zoomable map


The digitization of our holdings of grey literature and maps, which are often scarce or even unique, is a long-term activity. Text books previously held in the ISRIC library have been transferred to Wageningen UR Library, which offers a document delivery service, to make them more widely accessible and to make room for new acquisitions of country soil reports.