Laura, from Spain, an agronomist by training, worked as a Guest Researcher on “soil carbon dynamics”. This included the development and testing of a summary-model of soil organic carbon dynamics focusing on defined land use changes in the Brazilian Cerrado.

An important aim of the ‘scholarship’ was to a write peer-reviewed paper on this subject. In addition to this, several proposals for follow up studies were prepared respectively submitted for possible external funding.

ISRIC provided a stipend, working facilities and scientific support. Niels Batjes acted as her supervisor.

Kevin, a PhD student from France, worked on the development of digital soil mapping methods for soil properties to improve soil data at the regional scale.

His advisors at ISRIC were Gerard Heuvelink and Tom Hengl.

Juan Carranza-Parra joined ISRIC as a ‘student assistant’ to contribute to the DATA (WoSIS) project, with special attention for metadata in support of the ISRIC Soil Data Hub. At the time, Juan was completing his MSc. Earth & Environment at Wageningen University. His work was supervised by Eloi Ribeiro under general direction from Niels Batjes.

Jiaying is an associate professor at the resource and environmental college, Huazhong Agricultural University, China. During his stay at ISRIC, Jiaying completed a soil map of Jiangxi province, combining SoilGrids covariates and outputs. He was also interested in using proximal sensing data (pXRF and spectrum) to improve digital soil mapping. Scientific support was provided by Gerard Heuvelink, Luís Duque Moreira de Sousa, and Fenny van Egmond.

Jiaying's guest research at  ISRIC was sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Francis Silatsa, from Cameroon, stayed at ISRIC while a PhD student. During his stay, he completed/validated the soil profile database for Cameroon,  and learned data analysis techniques for the production of soil maps for Cameroon at a spatial resolution of 100 m, to a depth of 200 cm. His work was supervised by Tom Hengl.

Eliana first came to ISRIC in 2012 to work on her PhD (Fed. University of Viçosa) on “digital soil mapping” and to acquire experience in producing soil property and class maps with special attention for the Rio Doce Basin, Minas Gerais. Her stay was funded by the Brazilian CAPES foundation.

After having obtained her Doctorate, Eliana returned to ISRIC as a guest researcher (2013-2015) for further research on ‘Pedometric Mapping for Brazil’.

Nynke, an employee of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), worked on a part-time basis as a guest researcher at ISRIC. She contributed to a cooperation project with PBL on ‘Global Modelling of Soil Degradation and the Impact on Ecosystem Services.’

While at ISRIC, she worked mainly with Stephan Mantel.

Cristine, an Associate Professor at the Soil Science Department of Federal University of Viçosa, Minas Gerais (Brazil), worked on the World Soil Museum during her sabbatical at ISRIC.