International Soil Reference and Information Centre

ISRIC - World Soil Information is an independent, science-based foundation. The institute was founded in 1966 following a recommendation of the International Society of Soil Science (ISSS) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It has a mandate to serve the international community with information about the world’s soil resources to help addressing major global issues.

ISRIC (International Soil Reference and Information Centre)is the ICSU World Data Centre for Soils (WDC-Soils) since 1989 and it collaborates with a wide range of partners worldwide.

ISRIC operates in three priority areas:

• Soil data and soil mapping
• Application of soil data in global development issues
• Training and education

Services

• World Soil Profiles — Towards a unified, web-based soil profile database
• Worldgrids.org — A repository of gridded predictors with global or at least partial global coverage
• SoilGrids1km - Soil property and class maps for the world, at 1km resolution (0.008333333 arcdeg) derived from digital soil mappimg
• Dataset download service - Download ISRIC's zipped data sets
• GeoNetwork metadata service — Search soil-related metadata from ISRIC and other organisations from around the world
• World Soil Library - Search the ISRIC library and map collection
• World Soil Museum — A display of some 80 soil profiles representing the major soils (WRB Reference Soil Groups) that occur around the world
• Training and education — A range of training and educational modules (e.g. ISRIC Spring School)

Green Water Credits

ISRIC also has a funding project for implementing "green water" (rainwater) management practices by farmers.

References

1) Annual Highlights 2012-2013

2) On solid ground (ISRIC 2009)

3) Development of global soil information facilities. Data Science Journal 2013:12, 70-74

4) State of the Art Report on Global and Regional Soil Information (GSP 2012)

Useful links

• ISRIC website
• ICSU World Data System
• International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS)
• Global Soil Partnership (GSP)
• GlobalSoilMap.net
• European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC)
• Institute for Environment and Sustainability, EC Joint Research Centre (IES-JRC)