Integrated soil data are needed to inform climate mitigation, land management and agricultural practices. Avni Malhotra et al. discuss recent advances in soil carbon data led by the International Soil Carbon Network (ISCN) and other groups, including ISRIC.

The data team at ISRIC – World Soil Information has just released a new version of standardised soil profile data for the world. These were derived from WoSIS (World Soil Information Service), ISRIC’s central database. The present version contains quality-assessed and standardised data for some 196 thousand soil profiles, representing over 832 thousand soil layers (or horizons), and over 6 million records. The profiles come from 173 countries.

On August 26th, ISRIC, The Nature Conservancy China and the Liaoning Institute of Sandy Land Control and Utilization signed a framework agreement on joint cooperation on 'restoration of degraded sandy land and sustainable use in Liaoning province'.

ISRIC will closely collaborate with TNC to provide internationally promising sustainable land management practices for local application.

Our colleagues Niels Batjes and Fenny van Egmond contributed to this research review in Global Change Biology, led by Prof. Pete Smith (Univ. of Aberdeen), as a contribution to ISRIC's CIRCASA and GRA-related activities. The paper reviews methods and challenges of measuring SOC change directly in soils, before examining some recent novel developments that show promise for quantifying SOC.

Bertin Takoutsing and Yuri Gelsleichter, two 2019 CLIFF-GRADS Awardees, are currently completing their research stay at @ISRICorg.

Yuri Gelsleichter, from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Bertin Takoutsing, from the World Agroforestry Centre (Cameroon), came to support ISRIC and work on their PhD-research during a six month stay in Wageningen. They came as visitors and leave as Friends of ISRIC. We look forward to continued collaboration.  

Our colleagues Luis Moreira de Sousa, Laura Poggio and Bas Kempen  compare the performance of five popular eaqual-area projections. They show that the Homosoline projection is the only projection that manages to minimize angular and distance distortions simultaneously, with significant savings in space and computation time. The Homosoline approach is now used in ISRIC's digital soil mapping workflows.

For details, see: https:\\dx.doi.org\doi:10.3390/ijgi8080351

The Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA) awards 33 PhD fellowships for 2020 on the measurement and management of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage in agricultural systems. Three positions are available at ISRIC: #23 - Crop intensification through improved fertilizer application decision making in Ethiopia to face climate change impacts; #24 -Improved soil carbon mapping in sub-Saharan Africa to support soil fertility studies ; and, #25 - Mapping soil organic carbon change to support climate change mitigation. 

This article about soil property estimates for the world (WISE30sec), derived using a pedology-based approach, is among the most cited Geoderma papers since 2016.

Soil property maps and thermal infrared imagery were combined to map soil salinity development (1986-20916) in space and time on a global scale.

For details, see the co-authored article in Remote Sensing of Environment.

ISRIC, in its role as Soil Data Facility of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP), is an important contributor to the Global Soil Information System (GLOSIS), a federated system of national databases. A common standard -or information model- is needed to enable different soil databases to ‘talk’ to each other, and this requires a common language. Various attempts to define such a standard have been undertaken during the last decade.