ISRIC Spring School 2022 welcomed 44 participants

On May 20, 2022, the 9th edition of ISRIC’s Spring School completed, this year offering a five-day course on Hands-on Digital Soil Mapping.

The course, held online, attracted 44 participants from 21 countries. The main topics covered included:

• geostatistics for soil mapping,
• soil and covariate data preparation,
• remote and proximal soil sensing,
• machine learning for soil mapping,
• sampling for statistical validation, and
• mapping plant-available soil water and nutrients.

Modules included many hands-on practical exercises, which took place in a new online environment selected by Spring School’s instructors: Rstudio Cloud. Participants gave this feedback about their experience and how they will apply what they learned:

“I loved the format of the course! Working on RStudio cloud and making the script available with the html allowed me to work at my own pace, without platform problems (R packages, etc) and to test myself.”

“This course exceeded all my expectations. The knowledge of the presenters and students was remarkable. The feedback and tutorials were very well done.”

“I'm working with SWAT model and digitalized soil data is a gap that we often find. So this course will be very much useful for my future work.”

“I find [the course] really helpful for evaluating other people's predictions, since creating maps is so popular at the moment, but most people do not evaluate them in a meaningful way.”

View the course program to see the daily schedule and the list of instructors who taught the modules: ISRIC 2022 Spring School Program

“We hope that participants learnt a lot that they can apply in their future work, and we look forward to staying in touch with them via our community of practice,” said Gerard Heuvelink, ISRIC senior researcher and special professor in pedometrics and digital soil mapping at Wageningen University and Research. “At ISRIC we create digital soil information products, but we are also more and more interested in supporting others to create their own, Spring School is a great program which helps us achieve that.”

In addition to the digital soil mapping modules, participants also took a virtual tour of ISRIC’s World Soil Museum and the course ended with an invited lecture from ISRIC guest researcher David G. Rossiter on the topic “How useful are DSM products?” View the virtual museum tour below.

For more information about Spring School, visit this webpage. This ISRIC course is part of our community of practice program, where we bring together professionals who produce soil information products. Together, we learn and share ideas, methods, and experiences. The community of practice is particularly relevant for people creating soil information products at the national level, sign up here if interested.