In celebration of World Soils Day, the Global Soil Museum Network will offer free virtual museum tours to the public at 12:00 Central European Time on Friday, December 4. Register online in advance.

Landscape in Ethiopia. Photo credit: Rod Waddington

On November 2, several projects funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 “Sustainable Intensification in Africa” topic met to share information about their work and benefit from each other’s expertise.

The online education platform edX chose the course offered by the university of Leuven (KU Leuven) in collaboration with the ISRIC - World Soil Museum as one of ten finalists for their 2020 Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning.

SoilGrids, a global soil properties maps, is now available to use via Google Earth Engine.

Last month, the WORLDSOILS project held its kickoff meeting. This project is an effort to monitor topsoil organic carbon content with a new approach. This work is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The ESA WORLDSOILS project’s methods are based in Earth Observation (EO) technology with the main objectives of:

This month, ISRIC led a four-day training for the Rwanda Agricultural Board (RAB) about the first steps needed to build a national soil information system.  

“The set of trainings provided by ISRIC will help Rwanda, through RAB, to keep soil and agronomy datasets well organized so they are easy to analyze and use,” said RAB Principal Research Fellow Vicky Ruganzu. Mr. Ruganzu attended the training and is looking forward to seeing Rwanda’s soil data aggregated and standardized. 

Early September, we welcomed CLIFF-GRADS awardee Maria Eliza Turek, a PhD candidate from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, as guest researcher.  Maria has a background in soil physics and environmental modelling and will mainly contribute to projects on ‘Mapping derived soil hydrological properties using machine learning’ and ‘Mapping soil organic carbon change to support climate change mitigation’.

Like other colleagues, Maria will be mainly working from her new 'home' in Wageningen in view of current COVID-related restrictions.