ISRIC - World Soil Information serves the international community with a wide array of tailor-made courses and lectures. From 15-19 May 2017,  we organized the fifth edition of the ISRIC Spring School on 'Mapping, classification and assessment of soils'. 

Site-specific fertilizer recommendations for major food crops in West Africa have been updated and mapped by ISRIC in collaboration with the International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) and experts from the NARs of Benin, Burkina Faso and Ghana. The project was carried out within the context of the West Africa Fertilizer Program (USAID WAFP) which IFDC has implemented over last five years in collaboration with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). 

  As part of the efforts to launch a new corporate website, the logo of ISRIC – World Soil Information has been undergoing a re-design. Martijn Schornagel from Momono Bureau voor grafisch ontwerp was tasked to carefully modernise and simplify the existing version.

Through a live streaming video connection, Class 4B and 4A of Concordia International School in Hanoi, Vietnam have explored the soils of the world in the ISRIC world soil museum. The students, on average 10 years old, are studying soils in a science module that delves into topics such as landscape, soil formation and how soils are managed. The class was introduced to the soils in the museum that is located 8862 km in a straight line from their school, by Stephan Mantel, Head of the World Soil Museum.

ISRIC has released a large set of standardised soil profile data for the world. It contains 4 million records for some 94 thousand profiles. The data are freely available from our website.

The data come from various sources. The provenance and licence strongly determined which data could be standardised and subsequently served to the international community.

Procedures for obtaining, checking, standardising, and serving the various source data were published in Earth System Science Data (17 February 2017), an open-access journal.

ISRIC – World Soil Information signed an agreement with the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IARRP/CAAS), to cooperate in research and innovation on cultivated land quality conservation and novel fertilizers.

ISRIC has signed an agreement with FAO within the framework of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) for capacity building to support 16 countries in the development of national soil organic carbon (SOC) maps.

The renewed recognition of the central role of soil resources for assuring food security and the increased awareness that soil play a fundamental role in climate change adaptation and mitigation has put soils on the global agenda.

ISRIC – World Soil Information supports the Land Degradation Neutrality Target Setting Programme (LDN TSP) implemented by the UNCCD Secretariat and the Global Mechanism.

ISRIC — World Soil information participates in World Soil Day celebrations in the Russian Federation.

The prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Medal has been awarded to Professor Johan Bouma, Emeritus Professor of Soil Science, Wageningen University. ISRIC wishes to congratulate Professor Bouma with this important achievement. Johan is Honorary Fellow of ISRIC, past member of the ISRIC Board, and a long-term friend and advisor of our institute.

The medal will be allocated at the occasion of the EGU 2017 General Assembly.