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.

Today was the kick-off meeting for the Soil4Africa project. Funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, Soils4Africa will put in place by 2024 an Open-data Soil Information System (SIS). The SIS will enable farmers, agri-businesses, scientists, and policymakers in their efforts towards sustainable intensification of agriculture and boosting food security; by improving the quality and availability of African soil data. ISRIC is leading the Soils4Africa consortium.

The Soils4Africa project aims to:

New paper by Andri Baltensweiler, Gerard B.M. Heuvelink, Marc Hanewinkel and Loren Walther on 'Microtopography shapes soil pH in flysch regions across Switzerland' published in Geoderma.

Read more here

New paper by Feng Liu, David G.Rossiter, Gan-Lin Zhang and De-ChengLi on 'A soil colour map of China' published in Geoderma.

Read more here.

Today we released an expanded webtool for visualising, querying and downloading of world soil data. The initial version, released in early 2020, focused on a new series of soil property maps generated using SoilGrids. In addition to this, the expanded version also presents the underpinning soil profile data as derived from WoSIS.