Soil Geographic Databases

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Providing information on the soils of the world is an enormous task and continuing challenge for ISRIC — World Soil information. ISRIC collects, harmonizes and publishes global soil geographic information, whereas many national, regional, local and NGO organizations provide soil information specific to their area and according to their procedures and standards. This page is a catalogue of digital soil resources available outside our organisation.

Looking for ISRIC’s data products? Click here. These include the SoilGrids 250m predictive maps of soil properties and classes, their generalizations to 1km and 5km resolutions, the WoSIS Soil Profile Database, and the WISE v3.1 harmonized Global Soil Profile Dataset.

This page attempts to catalogue all freely-downloadable primary soils information usable in a GIS either as 'points', lines, polygons or grids ('rasters'). This compilation has been maintained first at University of Twente/ITC (1997-2014), then at Cornell University (2014-2017), and now at ISRIC by guest researcher David G. Rossiter . He has described the status and prospects for on-line soil geographic databases as of November 2014, as described in a online book chapter, and presented an hour-long lecture on the topic as part of the ISRIC Spring School 2015. In 2013 the FAO Global Soil Partnership published "State of the Art Report on Global and Regional Soil Information: Where are we? Where to go?".

Information outdated or missing? Please do not hesitate to contact us using the e-mail button at the bottom of this page.

Last update: 02-March-2024

Contact:

David G. Rossiter