ISRIC Spring School 2016

From 9 to 13 May, ISRIC – World Soil Information successfully organized the fourth edition of the ISRIC spring school on mapping, classification and assessment of soils. This edition attracted 49 participants from 31 countries. Two parallel courses were run: Hands-on Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF) and World Soils and their Assessment (WSA).

The GSIF course introduced participants to geostatistics, processing of soil covariates, quantification of uncertainty in soil modelling, regression modelling for digital soil mapping, 3D soil mapping with the GSIF package for the statistical software R, space-time modelling of soil data and visualisation of soil data in Google Earth. The WSA course introduced participants to the soils of the world, soil description and classification based on the World Reference Base for soil resources, which included a field trip to study the soils in the surroundings of Wageningen, soil functions, sustainable soil management and world soil databases.

Guest lectures were given by Dr. Marius Heinen from Alterra, em. Prof. Dr. Seppe Deckers from the KU Leuven, and Dr. David Rossiter from Cornell University.