The Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA) awarded scholarships to 57 PhD students to boost their scientific capability (CLIFF-Grads Round 4). Two of these positions will be hosted by ISRIC in 2021: Improved soil carbon mapping in sub-Saharan Africa to support soil fertility and climate mitigation studies (Azamat Suleymanov, (Russia) and  Advances in global mapping of soil carbon sequestration potential and links with drought conditions (Stephan van der Westhuizen, South Africa) .

New paper in EJSS on ‘Machine learning in space and time for modelling soil organic carbon change’ by Gerard B. M. Heuvelink, Marcos E. Angelini, Laura Poggio, Zhanguo Bai, Niels H. Batjes, Rik van den Bosch, Deborah Bossio, Sergio Estella, Johannes Lehmann, Guillermo F. Olmedo, and Jonathan Sanderman. more

New paper by Laura Poggio (ISRIC), Alessandro Gimona, Inge Aalders, Jane Morrice and Rupert Hough (James Hutton Institute) on ‘Legacy data for 3D modelling of peat properties with uncertainty estimation in Dava bog – Scotland’ published in Geoderma Regional.

ISRIC would like to congratulate Professor A. (Tom) Veldkamp, valued member of the ISRIC Managing Board, with his new appointment as the Rector Magnificus of the University of Twente.

As indicated earlier, services for SoilGrids version 2017 have been discontinued in view of the new release of SoilGrids version 2020.Data for the superseded SoilGrids version 2017 will remain available as geotiff at: https://files.isric.org/soilgrids/former/2017-03-10/data/ (Webdav service).

After the release of the 2020 version of SoilGrids (see here for more details), a number of changes will happen to the soilgrids.org services and associated infrastructures. We are aware that these changes may have an impact on users of our services.

Since the sneak preview on World Soil Day 2019, ISRIC - World Soil Information has been finalizing a new set of soil property maps for the world (SoilGrids250m), incorporating comments from many experts and organizations. Numerous improvements were implemented since publication of the `2017 version’, making this a completely new product. The GIS layers can be accessed using various services.

ISRIC is preparing for a new release of SoilGrids. This involves migrating the services to a new website and host. Unfortunately, this means that soilgrids.org will be down for a couple of days until the new release goes live (planned for 4 May).

Today marks the launch of the Soil Spectroscopy programme of the Global Soil Laboratory Network (GLOSOLAN) of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP), which is based at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In light of the coronavirus outbreak, the Spring School for 2020 has been definitely cancelled.

We took into consideration the health and well-being of our international participants as well as the uncertainty about the end of the corona crisis, and the international and local measures that may still be in place in the coming months.