Join the World Soil Museum to celebrate the importance of soil and its connection to water!

For the annual World Soil Day celebrated on December 5, this year, the ISRIC World Soil Museum is hosting a one-hour online interactive program on the theme Soil and Water: A source of life. The program, held via Zoom, begins at 11:00 CET, is free to attend and requires registration.

The one-hour program includes:

ISRIC’s soil library and map collection holds more than 10,000 maps and 17,000 reports and books related to soil information from all over the world. This collection is open to the public and much of our holdings have been digitized and are available to view online.

Access the ISRIC library

ISRIC – World Soil Information, host of the World Data Centre for Soils, was re-certified as a Trustworthy Data Repository by the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board through 2026. This complements our re-accreditation as a regular member of the International Science Council (ISC) World Data System earlier this year.

Access the CTS certification here: CTS certification (11/2023-11/2026)

The twenty-first session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (#CRIC21) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) takes place this week from 13 to 17 November in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Together with our partners at the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technology (WOCAT), we support the efforts in assisting countries to enhance land degradation neutrality (LDN) monitoring and reporting, promoting South-South collaboration, and advancing integrated land use planning.

ISRIC – World Soil Information recently released an expanded webtool for visualising, querying and downloading of world soil data. This update expands on the initial SoilGrids and World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) platform launched in 2020 and provides improved performance for data access via -Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Map Service (WMS).

Access the updated platform here: soilgrids.org

^{Musefa Redi Abegaze (right) assessing the root depth and density of a maize plant after carefully detaching the soil from the roots}

During the 2023 main cropping season, research fieldwork was carried out in Ethiopia by PhD candidate Musefa Redi Abegaz in support of climate-smart agriculture, specifically to derive climate-smart fertilizer recommendations in Ethiopia. This research is part of the the Land Soil Crop Information Services (LSC Hubs) project.

Increasing soil carbon stocks is one option in our global toolbox to reach important targets such as the Paris Agreement commitments and EU Green Deal. International coordination of research on conserving and increasing soil carbon is essential. This will help us harness the co-benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, soil health and food security.

European Union (EU) funded Horizon 2020 Soils4Africa project held its third Annual Project Meeting in May 2023 in Accra, Ghana. The gathering provided an opportunity to reflect on achievements and lessons learned so far by this four-year continent-wide project in Africa. The project’s ongoing work includes soil sampling on agricultural land in Africa, laboratory analysis, development of the soil information system, and stakeholder engagement.

At ISRIC – World Soil Information we have large global datasets, but often people would like to have data for a smaller area such as a single country. If you are looking for freely accessible, quality-assessed soil data for one or more countries, you can easily search for that using the new GraphQL API linked to the WoSIS (World Soil Information Service) database.

On the surface of Mars, can we call the loose material covering the Red Planet ‘soil’? What are its characteristics compared to Earth’s soil and could it ever host human life? These questions are the basis of a new temporary exhibit at the ISRIC World Soil Museum which begins on Wednesday, September 13 called Red Planet Regolith: All about the fine dust that covers Mars.