8 September ISRIC celebrated its 50^th anniversary with an informal get-together of current and former colleagues, and friends of ISRIC.

During the event em. prof. dr. JA (Seppe) Deckers and dr. RA (Bob) MacMillan have been appointed as Honorary Fellows.

In their speeches, former director David Dent, Johan Bouma, and current director Rik van den Bosch addressed past, present and future aspects of ISRIC. During the event em. prof. dr. Seppe Deckers and dr. Bob MacMillan have been appointed as Honorary Fellows.

ISRIC – World Soil Information has just released a major update of its global predictions of soil properties and classes, now available at a spatial resolution of 250 m. The previous SoilGrids system at 1 km resolution has been systematically upgraded and the accuracy of the predictions has been improved (up to two times) compared to the previous predictions. The new version of SoilGrids predictions comes with an open data licence, i.e. it is available at no cost.

The ISRIC 'Highlights 2014-2015' describes our role in international developments, main activities and research achievements during the past two years. Read more

The World Soil Museum of ISRIC – World Soil Information in Wageningen can now be visited online. The museum has a collection of reference soil profiles from around the world. These 3D profiles, or monoliths, are used to explain main soil forming factors and to show the importance of the soil for ensuring food security, mitigating climate change, or in terms of their cultural value. So far, visitors had to come to the campus in Wageningen to physically visit the museum.

ISRIC has now Africa-wide maps with important nutrients including total N, total and available P, exchangeable K, Ca, Mg (and Na), Sulfur and extractable Al, Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn and B. These maps can be used as input to underpin regional extrapolation of measured and modelled crop response to fertilisers. The accuracy of the maps varies from one property to another and additional soil data, more evenly distributed over the continent and continuously added through collaborative efforts, will certainly further enhance the accuracy of the maps.

From 9 to 13 May, ISRIC – World Soil Information successfully organized the fourth edition of the ISRIC spring school on mapping, classification and assessment of soils. This edition attracted 49 participants from 31 countries. Two parallel courses were run: Hands-on Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF) and World Soils and their Assessment (WSA).

To better contribute to the growing international efforts towards full and open sharing of data, as advocated by ICSU-WDS, GEOSS, GODAN and other organizations, ISRIC – World Soil Information has updated its Data Policy. Effective 19 April 2016, ISRIC is pleased to make its soil information products available to data users under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY-NC; CC BY for datasets and CC BY-SA for derived predictions and visualisations). Soil data provided to ISRIC by third parties will be managed in WoSIS in accordance with the license specified by the data provider.

ISRIC was invited to participate in the second São Paulo Soil Scientist Meeting and the first Pedometrics workshop, organized by the Brazilian Soil Science Society (Sociedade Brasileira de Ciência do Solo) at Campinas (2-4 March 2016).

ISRIC director Rik van den Bosch gives his vision on developments of soil mapping in 'Adjacent Government'. He explains how soil mapping changed from experienced soil surveyors walking in the field and delineating soil mapping units by hand to digital soil mapping, an important activity of ISRIC: up to date soil information is crucial for solving the five big issues of our time: food insecurity, climate change, environmental degradation, watewr scarcity, and thereats to biodiversity.

3 February 2016, a high-level Bhutanese delegation including the State Secretary of Agriculture has been visiting WUR, and ISRIC.

Background to their visit is the country’s ambitious aim to become 100% organic by 2020.