From May 13, the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Tropical Soil Science will be accessible online. The course, ‘An introduction to soils ecosystems and livelihoods in the tropics’, is a production of KU Leuven in collaboration with ISRIC - World Soil Information. The course, supported by JRC and FAO, teaches about how soil properties vary across tropical ecosystems and landscapes and their impact on biodiversity and livelihoods. The MOOC introduces subscribers to basic concepts of soil and soils in the tropics.

Royal Eijkelkamp will be sponsoring the World Soil Museum in Wageningen for the next three years. Fons Eijkelkamp and Stephan Mantel signed the sponsorship agreement recently. The World Soil Museum, hosted by ISRIC – World Soil Information, exhibits a wide range of soil types from all over the world.

Yuri Gelsleichter from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Bertin Takoutsing from the World Agroforestry Centre (Cameroon) have come to support ISRIC and work on their PhD-research during a six month stay in Wageningen.

ISRIC - World Soil Information will attend the European Space Agency's (ESA) World Soils User Consultation Meeting (2-3 July 2019, Frascati, Italy). We have a special interest in Earth Observation (EO) data as an important source of co-variates for our space-time digital mapping of soil properties (SoilGrids), aimed at supporting monitoring and early warning of land degradation episodes and processes. Our colleague Dr Luís Moreira de Sousa is member of the Scientific Committee.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded the development of a Soil Intelligence System (SIS) for three states in India, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha, to support better decision-making in agriculture. The project will develop comprehensive soil information at scale and build accessible geospatial information systems, following FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles.

The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) has funded soil data harmonisation within the Danube basin to support the Danube strategy. In 2020, the project will deliver a harmonised soil and terrain (SOTER) database, at 1:250,000 scale, which will support soil and land use policy development in the Danube basin.

The Climate Food and Farming Network (CLIFF) and the Global Research Alliance (GRA) awards record 33 fellowships for 2019 research on agricultural emissions and mitigation.

Two of these early-career scientists will be hosted by ISRIC - World Soil Information. Bertin Takoutsing from Cameroon will work on 'Accounting for errors in SOC estimates introduced by proximal sensing methods'. Yuri Gelsleichter from Brazil will work on 'Assessing the impact of land use change scenarios on soil organic carbon stocks'.

On November 30, 2018, the World Data System (WDS) of the International Science Council (ISC, formerly ICSU) has formally re-accredited ISRIC (WDC Soils) as a WDS Regular Member for a further three years.

As part of the re-accreditation process, we already obtained the CoreTrustSeal certification (24 July 2018), which defines 16 requirements for core-certified repositories.

Regular WDS members are nodes that deal directly with data curation and data analysis services.

In conjunction with World Soil Day (5 December), our colleague Dr Laura Poggio is attending the 3rd Global Soil Security Conference on ‘Soil Security and Planetary Health’ (Sydney, 4-6 December 2018). Laura will be speaking about our recent work on ‘facilitating land capability assessments through automation of the generation of land quality indicators’.

On 21st November 2018, Richard Gordon(CEO Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research) and Rik van den Bosch (Director ISRIC – World Soil Information) have signed a Framework Agreement.