Land Soil Crop Hubs partners gathered in the World Soil Museum in Wageningen, The Netherlands, to share ideas for the next steps and reflect on the project process.

For the Horizon 2020-funded “Holistic management practices, modelling and monitoring for European forest soils,” (HoliSoils) project, ISRIC – World Soil Information recently published an explainer blog on the topic of how harmonised datasets of forest soil properties can support mapping and modelling in Europe.

On 31 May 2023, ISRIC – World Soil Information hosted a first meeting of a new community of practice for national-level soil information producers across Africa. The focus of the meeting was sharing results from a community survey, filled out by more than 120 soil information producers across Africa, about what professional development gaps this type of program could fill.

ISRIC – World Soil Information welcomes guest researcher Ashenafi Ali Abduljelil, a PhD candidate from Addis Ababa University. His time at ISRIC is supported by the Climate Food and Farming Network and the Global Research Alliance (CLIFF GRADS) scholarship.

At global and continental scales, natural resource maps provide a basis for checking on how ecosystems are responding to human impact. However, how accurate are those maps, and how certain can we be that they are reliable to guide our actions on climate change, biodiversity preservation and other big issues?

Soils4Africa, a continent-wide effort in Africa to generate 20,000 new soil data points using standardised methods, is now in the fieldwork stage. Through coordinated soil sample collection, lab analysis and data infrastructures, the project aims to deliver an open-data soil information system for Africa.

On 13 April 2023, ISRIC signed a partnership agreement with IFDC focused on activities to improve soil fertility and soil health in support of sustainable intensification of agricultural production, predominantly in Africa.

The WORLDSOILS project consortium is building an Earth observation-based soil organic carbon monitoring system. WORLDSOILS successfully completed phase two in 2022 and is now working on the next phase.

As of March 2023, a new publication explaining the background and application of the WRB system is available as a reference module in Elsevier’s new Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences Reference Collection.

Wageningen University and Research Executive Board President Dr Sjoukje Heimovaara met with ISRIC – World Soil Information director and staff on 27 February 2023 at the World Soil Museum.