Staff

Ashenafi Ali is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies of Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, who joined ISRIC as guest researcher through a fellowship awarded by the CLIFF-GRADS scholarship. He is working as an interface of GIZ - Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT - Ministry of Agriculture - Coalition of the Willing, on various soil information related projects. His professional carrier evolved as soil surveyor and soil legacy data officer. Currently, he is particularly focused on soil legacy data harmonization and development of operational multilayer soil property maps for improved land, soil and crop management in Ethiopia. His work at ISRIC is supervised by Johan Leenaars and Gerard Heuvelink.

Ad has more than 30 years experience in soil, plant and water analysis, and assessment of reliability of laboratory data, including consultancy in laboratory methods and quality management in developing countries.

Ad joined the International Soil Museum in Utrecht in 1971. His main focus while at ISRIC was on data quality, documentation, and the development and use of collections.

Ad retired in September 2016. Since that time, as a guest researcher, he provides special support on 'soil analytical methods' to the DATA (WoSIS) project.

I am junior scientist from the Ufa Institute of Biology, department of soil science (Russia) with background in cartography and GIS. I joined ISRIC as guest researcher through a fellowship awarded by the Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA).

My thesis was focused on digital mapping of soil degradation processes (erosion and salinization). My research interests include digital soil mapping, cartography, GIS and soil ecology.

My scientific theme is “Improved soil carbon mapping in sub-Saharan Africa to support soil fertility and climate mitigation studies” supervised by Gerard Heuvelink.

Maria Eliza Turek is a PhD candidate from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, who joined ISRIC as guest researcher through a fellowship awarded by the Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA). She has a background in soil physics and environmental modelling and will mainly contribute to the projects on ‘Mapping derived soil hydrological properties using machine learning’ and ‘Mapping soil organic carbon change to support climate change mitigation’. Her work is supervised by Gerard Heuvelink and Niels Batjes.

Juan Carranza-Parra joined ISRIC as a ‘student assistant’ to contribute to the DATA (WoSIS) project, with special attention for metadata in support of the ISRIC Soil Data Hub. At the time, Juan was completing his MSc. Earth & Environment at Wageningen University. His work was supervised by Eloi Ribeiro under general direction from Niels Batjes.

Matthanje is a recent graduate of Wageningen University (MSc – International Land- and Water Management). Her main tasks as a ‘student assistant’ were to contribute to the DATA (WoSIS) project and to work on metadata in support of the ISRIC Soil Data Hub. Her work was supervised by Eloi Ribeiro under general direction from Niels Batjes.

Yuri is an Environmental Engineer with a background in Remote Sensing and GIS. He is a PhD candidate at Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro focusing on Proximal Soil Sensing. He is also involved with the Brazilian soil database and aims to contribute to the Universal Soil Classification System.

In 2019, Yuri joined ISRIC as guest researcher to contribute to modeling and digital soil mapping. His stay was made possible through a fellowship awarded by the Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA). 

Jiaying is an associate professor at the resource and environmental college, Huazhong Agricultural University, China. During his stay at ISRIC, Jiaying completed a soil map of Jiangxi province, combining SoilGrids covariates and outputs. He was also interested in using proximal sensing data (pXRF and spectrum) to improve digital soil mapping. Scientific support was provided by Gerard Heuvelink, Luís Duque Moreira de Sousa, and Fenny van Egmond.

Jiaying's guest research at  ISRIC was sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Angela is a Professor of Soil Science in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. During her guest research, Angela worked on the development of a gridded soil map for Saskatchewan, including identification and evaluation of the optimum Digital Soil Mapping technique(s) for the low-relief Canadian prairies. She was also interested in collaborating on development of interoperable soil information systems to facilitate integration among different data repositories, nationally and internationally.

Scientific support was provided by Gerard Heuvelink, Niels Batjes, and Eloi Ribeiro.

Francis Silatsa, from Cameroon, stayed at ISRIC while a PhD student. During his stay, he completed/validated the soil profile database for Cameroon,  and learned data analysis techniques for the production of soil maps for Cameroon at a spatial resolution of 100 m, to a depth of 200 cm. His work was supervised by Tom Hengl.

Wei came to ISRIC as a guest researcher sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Wei is an associate professor at the Beijing Normal University, China, and participated in several ongoing projects, such as Global Soil Information Facilities at ISRIC under the supervision of Tom Hengl and Gerard Heuvelink.

Dr Shangguan's research interests includes soil geography and soil physics, focusing on soil mapping.

During his guest research at ISRIC, Wei worked on a mapping the global soil depth and the soils of China.

Kevin, a PhD student from France, worked on the development of digital soil mapping methods for soil properties to improve soil data at the regional scale.

His advisors at ISRIC were Gerard Heuvelink and Tom Hengl.

Andrew came to ISRIC as a Postdoc Researcher from World Agroforesty Centre (ICRAF, Kenya). Andrew extended the soil spectroscopy package and assisted the ISRIC-AfSIS team in developing and documenting a Soil Spectral Reference Library as a part of the GSIF package and providing a well-organized spectral reference library for use by AfSIS for digital mapping purposes. Assistance was provided by Tom Hengl.

Alessandro came to ISRIC as a guest researcher sponsored by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil. He was a PhD student at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; part of his PhD research project at ISRIC was developed under the supervision of Dr. Gerard Heuvelink.

The general objective of his research was to evaluate the main sources of uncertainty in digital soil mapping. 

Dr Priyabrata Santra came to ISRIC to learn advanced research areas in geoinformatics. He worked on spatial assessment of soil properties using digital soil mapping techniques. Soil organic carbon content has been assessed by him at six different spatial scales starting from farmer’s field to national scale in India using geostatistical techniques. He also developed a web based GIS for Arid Western India to estimate soil water retention based on apedotransfer function model and digital soil maps (paper).

His visit at ISRIC was funded by world bank funded NAIP project in ICAR, India.

His research work at ISRIC was supported by Gerard Heuvelink and Niels Batjes.

Dr Uttam Kumar Mandal, a soil scientist by profession, came to ISRIC to get acquainted with advanced applications of Geo-informatics in the field of natural resources management. He learnt geo-statistical soil mapping techniques and developed the soil organic carbon stock map for Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh. He also worked on the digital soil and terrain (SOTER) units for West Bengal state. Further, he assessed spatio-temporal changes in land use land cover of Sundarbans using satellite imagery.

His visit at ISRIC was funded by the World Bank funded NAIP Project under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

His work at ISRIC was facilitated by Gerard Heuvelink and Niels Batjes.

Eliana first came to ISRIC in 2012 to work on her PhD (Fed. University of Viçosa) on “digital soil mapping” and to acquire experience in producing soil property and class maps with special attention for the Rio Doce Basin, Minas Gerais. Her stay was funded by the Brazilian CAPES foundation.

After having obtained her Doctorate, Eliana returned to ISRIC as a guest researcher (2013-2015) for further research on ‘Pedometric Mapping for Brazil’.

Milan is a teaching assistant in Cartography, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Department of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, University of Belgrade.

As a guest researcher, he worked on Digital Soil Mapping; scientific support was provided by Tom Hengl.

Nikoo Hamzehpour, a guest researcher from Iran (Tarbiat Modares University), worked on her PhD project "Evaluating spatial variability of soil salinity in Uromieh Plain".

Scientific advise was provided by Tom Hengl.

Nikolay, a guest researcher from Moscow State University, worked on the development of a SOTER database for a section of Russia. He also contributed to field work in Russia for the SOLEX project.

Scientific support was provided by Vincent van Engelen and Koos Dijkshoorn.

Cristine, an Associate Professor at the Soil Science Department of Federal University of Viçosa, Minas Gerais (Brazil), worked on the World Soil Museum during her sabbatical at ISRIC.

Dr Paddikal Chandran came to further his knowledge of soil and terrain databases (SOTER) and to get acquainted with various research institutes in the Netherlands.

During his stay Dr Chandran has developed an updated SOTER database for the Indo Gangetic Plains (IGP), India, building on earlier SOTER-related work for the international GEF-SOC project. Dr Chandran obtained funds for his visit to ISRIC under the World Bank funded National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP); ISRIC provided facilities and scientific support (Koos Dijkshoorn).

Nynke, an employee of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), worked on a part-time basis as a guest researcher at ISRIC. She contributed to a cooperation project with PBL on ‘Global Modelling of Soil Degradation and the Impact on Ecosystem Services.’

While at ISRIC, she worked mainly with Stephan Mantel.

Laura, from Spain, an agronomist by training, worked as a Guest Researcher on “soil carbon dynamics”. This included the development and testing of a summary-model of soil organic carbon dynamics focusing on defined land use changes in the Brazilian Cerrado.

An important aim of the ‘scholarship’ was to a write peer-reviewed paper on this subject. In addition to this, several proposals for follow up studies were prepared respectively submitted for possible external funding.

ISRIC provided a stipend, working facilities and scientific support. Niels Batjes acted as her supervisor.

Anselme Kouamé is a PhD candidate of the Soil Geography and Landscape group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and ISRIC - World Soil Information. His PhD research is entitled “A multi-model approach to identifying the causes of Ghana's variable maize yield responses”. His supervisors are Prof. Dr Gerard Heuvelink (WUR and ISRIC), Dr Prem Bindraban (IFDC - Fertilizer Development Center)  and Dr Ikram Chairi (UM6P University, Marocco). He was trained as an agricultural engineer and has several years of experience in agricultural plantation management, hydro-agricultural development, irrigation, soil fertility management, agricultural data science, digital soil mapping and crop modelling.

Qiuhong is a PhD candidate jointly trained by ISRIC, Wageningen University (WU) and the Chinese Academy of Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Her PhD research is on using mechanistic models, machine learning and geostatistics to model the relationship between potato yield and soil nutrients in China. Qiuhong is supervised by Gerard Heuvelink (ISRIC and Soil Geography and Landscape group, WU), Johan Leenaars (ISRIC), Tom Schut (Plant Production Systems group, WU) and Ping He (Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, CAAS).

Musefa is a PhD candidate of the Soil Geography and Landscape group at WUR and ISRIC, where he works under the supervision of Prof. dr. Gerard Heuvelink (WUR, ISRIC), Johan Leenaars (ISRIC), Dr. Temesgen Desalegn and Dr. Mezgebu Getnet (Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, EIAR, Ethiopia). His PhD research is on generating quality-assessed land-soil-crop information to support climate smart agriculture in Ethiopia. The PhD project is supported by the “Land, Soil, and Crop Information Services (LSC-IS) to support Climate Smart Agriculture” project in East Africa under the framework of the European initiative of Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA). He is a soil researcher in EIAR, Ethiopia.

Stephan is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and a PhD candidate at WUR. His PhD research is on developing modelling frameworks in which machine learning models can incorporate measurement error  in digital soil mapping. He will also investigate ways of mapping soil properties with multivariate machine learning, as well as mapping soil thickness with machine learning. Stephan is supervised by Gerard Heuvelink (WUR, ISRIC), Laura Poggio (ISRIC) and David Hofmeyr (Stellenbosch University).

Eric is a PhD candidate in the Soil Geography and Landscape group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and ISRIC - World Soil Information, where he works under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Gerard Heuvelink, Dr. Ikram Chairi (University of Mohammed VI Polytechnic, UM6P, Morocco) and Dr. Vincent Logah (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KNUST, Ghana). Eric is working on the Fertilizer Research and Responsible Implementation (FERARI) program to develop a machine learning model for yield prediction in Ghana. Eric is a soil scientist with a BSc in Geomatic Engineering from KNUST, Ghana, and an MPhil in Soil Health and Environmental Resources Management from the CSIR – College of Science and Technology, Ghana.

Cynthia was a PhD candidate at ISRIC and Wageningen University, where she worked under the supervision of Dr Ir. Gerard Heuvelink, Dr Ir. Titia Mulder and Ir. Niels Batjes on the development and use of a soil information system for imperfect soil data.

Bertin Takoutsing is an Associate Scientist in Land Health Management, working with the World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Cameroon. He was a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), and his doctoral research focused on the application and extension of state-of-the-art digital soil mapping approaches to analyse and quantify the spatial patterns of soil properties while accounting for uncertainty in soil measurements. As part of his PhD, Bertin visited ISRIC for six months in 2019, where he developed his research proposal and acquired additional skills in digital soil mapping techniques. more

Mirjam graduated from Wageningen University in Plant Sciences in 2015 and started her PhD in 2016. During her PhD, she did research on the 'effects of micro nutrient fertilization on crop growth in sub-Saharan Africa'. Her work has been supervised by Ellis Hoffland (Soil Quality, WUR); Bas Kempen (ISRIC) assisted with digital soil mapping and resulted in the thesis Models for predicting nutrient availability in soils from sub-Saharan Africa

Yingxia was a PhD candidate at WUR and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS, China). The general objective of her PhD research was 'space-time statistical analysis and modelling of nitrogen use efficiency indicators of China'. Yingxia was supervised by Gerard Heuvelink, Zhanguo Bai and Ping He (CAAS) and resulted in the thesis Statistical analysis and modelling of crop yield and nitrogen use efficiency in China

Luc was a Dutch PhD student, working on geostatistics and more specifically the use of Bayesian algorithms to increase the reliability of soil maps and landuse maps. Besides ISRIC, this PhD project was also supported by the Soil Geography and Landscape group (Wageningen UR) and by WenR (formerly Alterra, Wageningen UR). His work was supervised by Gerard Heuvelink and Dick Brus and resulted in the thesis Model-based Bayesian geostatistics for multi-scale mapping of soil agronomic variables.

Marcos came to ISRIC as a PhD candidate in 2013. In Argentina, he worked for the Soil Institute of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), which granted his PhD study. His well received thesis was about structural equation modelling for digital soil mapping.

Scientific support was provided by Gerard Heuvelink and Bas Kempen.

Chloé is a French MSc Geo-information Sciences (MGI) student at Wageningen University. She holds an Agriculture Engineering degree from UniLaSalle. Chloé’s MSc thesis addresses how to account measurement uncertainties in model validation, and compares the effects of either ignoring or acknowledging measurement errors in the fitting of random forest digital soil mapping models. The research is supervised by Sytze de Bruin, Gerard Heuvelink, and Stephan van der Westhuizen.

Anna Christien (Lisanne) Schoneveld is a Dutch MSc student of Wageningen University. Her master thesis research is to study the effect of synthetic profiles on SoilGrids. She analyses which parts of the world are under-represented in the feature and geographical space in the SoilGrids calibration dataset and which effect incorporating synthetic profiles has on the SoilGrids prediction maps. She also investigates how synthetic profiles can be generated using expert elicitation.

Merel Jager is a MSc student of Wageningen University. Her master thesis research was to study the influence of local data and local calibration on SoilGrids predictions, using case studies in India, Mozambique and the Netherlands. Merel worked on the Soilgrids project under supervision of Bas Kempen, Gerard Heuvelink and Sytze de Bruin (Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing).

Tom is a Dutch MSc student Geo-information Science (MGI) at Wageningen University. While studying International Tourism Management (BA), he was introduced to GIS and statistics. His fascination for both subjects combined with an interest in mapping led him to study MGI and ultimately fall in love with geostatistics. Currently, Tom works on a critical evaluation and improvement of cross-validation strategies for accuracy assessment of digital soil maps at ISRIC. The research is supervised by Gerard Heuvelink, Laura Poggio and Sytze de Bruin. Besides his activities at ISRIC, Tom works as a 'Geo-ICTer' at Tijhuis Ingenieurs, specialised in soil and water advisory services.

At the time, Rik was a Dutch MSc student at Wageningen University with a BSc in Soil, Water, Atmosphere and an MA in Landscape History. Rik worked on a space-time convolutional neural network for the digital soil mapping of soil organic carbon content and subsequently tested this methodology for Argentina. By bringing the spatial context of a point into the modelling stage, this machine learning technique can help to more accurately model and thus understand trends in SOC. The research was supervised by Gerard Heuvelink and Laura Poggio.

During his MSc study, Wietse worked on a soil mapping project in southern Colombia. His thesis was part of a larger project led by CIAT and partners aimed at evaluating land use types in terms of their soil quality and climate change mitigation potential. Active and total carbon were measured with a view to map SOC for the whole study area. The soil chemical part of his research was supervised by Mirjam Pulleman (Soil Biology and Biological Soil Quality) and Gerard Heuvelink supervised the digital soil mapping. 

Kees, a Dutch MSc student of Wageningen University, worked on the evaluation of methods for uncertainty quantification in Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) with special attention for Machine Learning, and the challenge of quantifying the uncertainties in DSM interpolations. His work was supervised by Gerard Heuvelink.

Job did his MSc thesis on the 'spatial prediction of the availability of zinc for plant uptake'. For this, he used a prediction model based on soil data from IFDC, his own soil analyses, the QUEFTS model (nutrient uptake + growth) and, where possible, environmental covariates. His case study focused on Rwanda. He was supervised by Ellis Hoffland (Soil Quality, WUR) and Bas Kempen (ISRIC).

Olaf is a graduate from Wageningen University in International Land and Water Management. During his internship at ISRIC, he contributed to the ISQAPER project; he was involved in a meta-analysis of the effects of agricultural practices on key soil quality indicators in major pedo-climatic zones across Europe and China. Olaf was supervised by Zhanguo Bai and Thomas Caspari.

Iolanda sought assistance from ISRIC to help her with the development of the 'Irish soil attribute maps' for selected soil properties. She applied pedometric techniques to the Irish SIS data to develop the soil attribute maps. Further, she contributed 200 profiles from the Irish SIS to the SoilGrids effort, for  validation purposes. Yolanda was supervised by Gerard Heuvelink, Bas Kempen and Tom Hengl.

Soufiane came to ISRIC to contribute to the Green Water Credits for Algeria Algeria as well as the RECARE project. His work was supervised by Godert van Lynden and Thomas Caspari. 

Susanne did her MSc study at the Soil Geography and Landscape Group of Wageningen University. During her internship with WenR (formerly Alterra, WUR) and ISRIC, she investigated the benefit of using legacy soil data in addition to 'contemporary' soil data for updating the national soil map of the Netherlands using digital soil mapping.  Her work was supervised by Dick Brus (WenR) and Bas Kempen (ISRIC).

Thanos did his MSc thesis on developing a framework for the generalization of SoilGrid maps, according to the user's zoom level. Guidance and scientific support were provided by Gerard Heuvelink (ISRIC) and Sytze de Bruin (GRS, WUR).

Siyu studied Geo-information Science at Wageningen University. Her MSc-research was on 'Digital Soil Mapping for Africa'. She analysed the usefulness of various statistical models to establish the relationship between the dependent variable (soil property) and explanatory variables (environmental covariates). Guidance was provided by Gerard Heuvelink.

Charl worked on developing/applying a method that considers soil legacy maps as co-variates in Digital Soil Mapping with a view to assessing possible gains in accuracy of the predictions. He was supervised by Johan Leenaars, Gerard Heuvelink and Sytze de Bruin (WenR, WUR).

Sabastine worked on Functional Digital Soil Mapping for the prediction of available water capacity in Nigeria The findings of his MSc study were published in the Vadose Zone Journal. Scientific support was provided by Hannes Reuter.

Liesbeth did her internship on the Green Water Credits program working on the Upper Tana basin project area in Kenya. Scientific support was provided by Sjef Kauffman and David Dent.

Chairman ISRIC Managing Board. Professor, Soil Geography and Landscape, Wageningen UR, The Netherlands

Director Operations, Environmental Sciences Group, Wageningen UR, The Netherlands

Environmental Sciences Group, Sub-department of Soil Quality, Wageningen UR, The Netherlands

Ass. Professor, Soil Physics and Land Management, Wageningen UR, The Netherlands

Rector Magnificus University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Business Controller, Environmental Sciences Group, Wageningen UR, The Netherlands