Quantifying Capability: GlobalSoilMap

Abstract

GlobalSoilMap is an initiative of the Digital Soil Mapping Working Groups of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS, digitalsoilmapping.org. Available at http://digitalsoilmapping.org/. Accessed 22 Oct 2015). It aims to meet the needs of the modelling community, farmers, land managers, policy developers and decision-makers, by creating a fine resolution (100 × 100 m grid) quantitative digital soil map of the world, using state-of-the-art and emerging technologies such as remote sensing, data mining and spatial databases. The data will be stored in a freely available distributed system with a set of standards for Web services. The approach has three components: digital soil mapping, recommendations for soil management and providing service to end users (Sanchez et al. Science 325, 2009). The project originated in 2006 as an effort to address the unmet need for quantitative answers to questions about soil-related issues such as soil carbon sequestration, the impact of soil carbon on biomass production and the change in soil status over time. To address such questions requires information about stores and fluxes of water, carbon, nutrients and solutes, in other words, functional properties of soils. The most significant stocks and flows are water including run-off, leaching, waterlogging and water available to plants, nutrients, carbon, solutes and acidification. Access to information about soil properties reduces risks in decision-making, but in order to understand and manage these risks, estimates of uncertainties in soil properties are required. Therefore, all quantitative data in the GlobalSoilMap will have an associated uncertainty. The project is facilitated by the synthesis of pedology, which focuses on soil processes, and pedometrics, which focuses on quantitative analyses.