SoilGridsTM, ISRIC - World Soil Information’s flagship global digital soil maps, are now available for use in the ESRI® Living Atlas of the World. Inside ESRI® Living Atlas, a collection of geographic information from around the globe, including maps, apps, and data layers, you can now access and use these 11 SoilGrids soil property maps at 250 meter resolution.

On 5 December 2023, the ISRIC World Soil Museum hosted a one-hour online celebration of World Soil Day’s 2023 theme: Soil and Water: a source of life.

Learn more about the event and watch the recording of the event.

Join the World Soil Museum to celebrate the importance of soil and its connection to water! This year, for World Soil Day, celebrated on December 5, the ISRIC World Soil Museum is hosting a one-hour online interactive program on the theme Soil and Water: A source of life.

ISRIC’s soil library and map collection holds more than 10,000 maps and 17,000 reports and books related to soil information from all over the world. This collection is open to the public and much of our holdings have been digitized and are available to view online.

ISRIC – World Soil Information, host of the World Data Centre for Soils, was re-certified as a Trustworthy Data Repository by the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board through 2026. This complements our re-accreditation as a regular member of the International Science Council (ISC) World Data System earlier this year.

The twenty-first session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) takes place this week from 13 to 17 November in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

ISRIC – World Soil Information recently released an expanded webtool for visualising, querying and downloading of world soil data. This update expands on the initial SoilGrids and World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) platform launched in 2020 and provides improved performance for data access via -Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Map Service (WMS).

During the 2023 main cropping season, research fieldwork was carried out in Ethiopia by PhD candidate Musefa Redi Abegaz in support of climate-smart agriculture, specifically to derive climate-smart fertilizer recommendations in Ethiopia. This research is part of the the Land Soil Crop Information Services (LSC Hubs) project.

Increasing soil carbon stocks is one option in our global toolbox to reach important targets such as the Paris Agreement commitments and EU Green Deal. International coordination of research on conserving and increasing soil carbon is essential. This will help us harness the co-benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, soil health and food security.

European Union (EU) funded Horizon 2020 Soils4Africa project held its third Annual Project Meeting in May 2023 in Accra, Ghana. The gathering provided an opportunity to reflect on achievements and lessons learned so far by this four-year continent-wide project in Africa.