Contribute data to the WoSIS effort
Your soil profile data can contribute to improving world soil information!
Below we describe how you and your organisation may share soil profile data for consideration in the World Soil Information System (WoSIS) and related global soil mapping activities (SoilGrids) for the greater benefit of the international community.
A wide range of data providers have already contributed data to the WoSIS effort, for which we are grateful. Nonetheless, many countries are still poorly represented in WoSIS. Such geographic and soil taxonomic gaps can only be filled with your participation!
Soilgrids portal showing number of profiles in WoSIS per country (click here for WoSIS dashboard)
By contributing additional point data, improved digital soil maps (SoilGrids) for the world can be generated; for specific regions or countries, these can be used as a covariate to improve prediction of soil properties through a digital soil mapping approach .
Profile-related data for consideration in WoSIS may be submitted in various ways:
1. For digital data sets, please send us an e-mail with a short data set description as well as the URL to the digital data set or the compressed dataset itself as attachment.
2. Analogue data should be entered using a template with standardised variable names. Preferred formats are described in the2020 WoSIS Procedures Manual.
Default templates are available in two formats (LibreOffice and MicroSoftOffice), see here.
We value data security and proper acknowledgement, please send us a signed copy of the data sharing agreement (Download template). The procedure for contributing profiles is described on a specific webpage. All submitted data sets will be evaluated for their suitability for inclusion and standardisation in WoSIS.
We particularly welcome datasets that also include duplicate measurements so that we may refine our procedures for quantifying the uncertainty in wet chemistry data (see Van Leeuwen et al. 2020).
We recommend you contact the WOSIS support team before preparing a dataset [2] in order to discuss important details and to ensure that your (and our) time is wisely spent.
ISRIC strongly encourages all contributors to assign a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) to their unique datasets. DOI's provide persistent access to a dataset and assign the dataset a unique identifier which can then be cited in WoSIS and elsewhere. There are several international organisations that issue DOI's such as Dataverse (via DANS or Harvard), Pangaea or Zenodo. In specific cases, ISRIC WDC-Soils can also mint DOI's for datasets on request, upon data screening .