New paper in Geoderma on ‘Model averaging for mapping topsoil organic carbon in France’ by Songchao Chen et al. with contributions from our colleagues Gerard Heuvelink and Laura Poggio.

With its partners, ISRIC is developing a Soil Fertility and Crop Nutrition Platform. The collaboration is aimed at developing and testing crop and site specific multi-nutrient fertiliser formulations at scale. Our colleagues Bas Kempen, Johan Leenaars and Rik van den Bosch are in Accra to discuss implementation for a new pilot area in Ghana. The new study will consider rainfed rice and maize in an area of over 20,000 km2 of cropland in the north, east and south of the country for which new soil maps will be created. The project will run for 2 to 3 years.

Our guest researcher, Dr David Rossiter, gave a lecture on “Providing consistent information on the world’s soils” at the Cornell Soil Science and Crop Sciences Seminar (23 Jan. 2020), detailing the breadth of ISRIC's activities.

We will be giving two Spring School courses soon (11-15 May, 2020). So far, 46 participants from different countries have registered; welcome! You can still register, but the available places are filling up rapidly.

More info on the courses:

Hands-on Digital Soil Mapping (DSM)  (maximum capacity has been reached, you can register in the waiting list

The Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA) awarded 31 PhD fellowships for 2020 on the measurement and management of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage in agricultural systems to early-career scientist from fourteen developing countries. One of these positions, 'Mapping soil organic carbon change to support climate change mitigation', will be hosted by ISRIC. Awardee Maria Eliza Turek from Brazil will join us in 2020.

ISRIC - World Soil Information has been updating their soil property maps for the world (SoilGrids250m). Numerous improvements were implemented since publication of the `2017 version’, making this a completely new product. The first layers (spatial predictions) are available as a ‘sneak preview’ (see bottom text for details); the full version with supporting web viewer will be released around March 2020.

New paper in Geoderma on ‘Mapping the major soil-landscape resources of the Ethiopian Highlands using random forest’ by our colleague Leenaars et al.

Congratulations to our colleague Gerard Heuvelink for falling in the @webofscience Highly Cited Researchers list for 2019. Well done!

https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2019/

Our colleague Prof. Gerard Heuvelink, special professor in Pedometrics and Digital Soil Mapping, has joined the senior editorial team of the European Journal of Soil Science as Deputy Editor. Congratulations! 

On November 5th, 2019, ISRIC and the Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (IAIE)，Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (HAAFS) signed a framework agreement on joint promotion of green development of agriculture in Hebei province, China. To promote green agricultural development, Hebei provincial government has authorized IAIE to establish and host the International Cooperative Research Center for Green Development of agriculture for Hebei province. ISRIC will help to setup the Centre and jointly propose research projects that will be funded by Hebei province.