The Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA) awarded 31 PhD fellowships for 2020 on the measurement and management of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage in agricultural systems to early-career scientist from fourteen developing countries. One of these positions, 'Mapping soil organic carbon change to support climate change mitigation', will be hosted by ISRIC. Awardee Maria Eliza Turek from Brazil will join us in 2020.

ISRIC - World Soil Information has been updating their soil property maps for the world (SoilGrids250m). Numerous improvements were implemented since publication of the `2017 version’, making this a completely new product. The first layers (spatial predictions) are available as a ‘sneak preview’ (see bottom text for details); the full version with supporting web viewer will be released around March 2020.

New paper in Geoderma on ‘Mapping the major soil-landscape resources of the Ethiopian Highlands using random forest’ by our colleague Leenaars et al.

Congratulations to our colleague Gerard Heuvelink for falling in the @webofscience Highly Cited Researchers list for 2019. Well done!

https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2019/

Our colleague Prof. Gerard Heuvelink, special professor in Pedometrics and Digital Soil Mapping, has joined the senior editorial team of the European Journal of Soil Science as Deputy Editor. Congratulations! 

From 11 - 15 May 2020, ISRIC - World Soil Information will organise a Spring School on digital soil mapping, classification and assessment for soil and environmental scientists, students, soil experts and professionals in natural resources management.

For additional information and registration please see here.

On November 5th, 2019, ISRIC and the Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (IAIE)，Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (HAAFS) signed a framework agreement on joint promotion of green development of agriculture in Hebei province, China. To promote green agricultural development, Hebei provincial government has authorized IAIE to establish and host the International Cooperative Research Center for Green Development of agriculture for Hebei province. ISRIC will help to setup the Centre and jointly propose research projects that will be funded by Hebei province.

This co-authored paper, with contributions from our colleagues Luis Moreira de Sousa and Jorge Mendes de Jesus, presents a re–make of the Python implementation of the WPS standard. It embraces modern Python technologies and the possibilities they offer. The adoption of WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) opens new ways for load balancing request execution and application encapsulation, that are exemplified with modern Python technologies.

This work provides a valuable contribution to the development of GLOSIS, developed under Pillar 4 of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP).

Our colleague Fenny van Egmond is in Rome (28-30 October 2019) to attend the third meeting of the Global soil laboratory network (GLOSOLAN). The network was established in 2017 in the framework of the GSP’s pillar 5 on ‘Harmonization of methods, measurements and indicators for the sustainable management and protection of soil resources’. GLOSOLAN is aimed at facilitating networking and capacity development through cooperation and information sharing between soil laboratories with different levels of expertise.

Our colleagues Johan Leenaars and Stephan Mantel are in Ethiopia (22-26 October 2019) to prepare 18 soil scientists, from eight universities, for a soil survey campaign covering 18 woredas (districts).