ISRIC logoSoil Information Resource Library

Welcome to ISRIC - World Soil Information Resource library. The library contains resources provided by various organisations, some in collaboration with ISRIC - World Soil Information. Resources provided here will support knowledge and skills development on various steps of the Soil Information Workflow, especially to develop soil information system on the national level. This library is under development, updated resources will be added, and your feedback will help in continued improvement. Read more about the resource library in the about section

Find tools, documents, tutorials, working groups on various topics on the soil science domain.

Start searching by filtering the results by topic and/or type below.

Data Collection
Guide

Intensive and widespread use of pesticides raises serious environmental and human health concerns. The presence and levels of 209 pesticide residues (active substances and transformation products) in …
Modelling and Mapping
Guide

The Sourcebook is designed to provide a conceptual foundation for soil organic carbon measurement and monitoring in croplands and grazing lands or rangelands. It provides methods and simple step-by-st…
Soil Archiving
Guide

Visualization can greatly benefit understanding of concepts and processes, which in soil science and geology can be done using real-life snapshots of soils and sediments in lacquer peels and glue peel…
Laboratory Analysis
Guide

This laboratory manual presents the procedures for soil analysis as they were in use at ISRIC at the time of writing (1986-2002). Indeed, because of changes within procedures or the introduction of ne…
Data Collection
Guide

Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS), a collaborative project led by the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute (TSBF) of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), based in N…
Modelling and Mapping
Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to map a soil property with geostatistical (kriging) approaches using the statistical software R. A sample dataset from the Geul river valley in the south of the Netherlands is…
Data Organisation
Guide

This Soil Data Assimiliation Guidance wiki is a collaborative effort to collect and describe hands-on good practices on data assimilation in the soil domain, with a focus on Europe. The term Soil data…
Modelling and Mapping
Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to fit a random forest model for soil data and use this model to spatially predict a soil property of interest across a mapping area using the statistical software R. The proce…
Data and Info Serving
Guide

In 2021 the Global Soil Information System (GloSIS) has been designed as a federation of soil information systems, which share interoperable soil data sets via web services. GloSIS connects soil infor…
Applying Soil Information
Tool

WOCAT (The World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies) has developed standard questionnaires to document SLM technologies, approaches and mapping (QM): WOCAT Questionnaire on Technolog…
Modelling and Mapping
Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to process and prepare input data for digital soil mapping (DSM) using the statistical software R. The processing steps are illustrated with a sample dataset from North Macedon…
Data and Info Serving
Licenses

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. These tools give everyone from individual creators to…
Data Collection
Guide

Soil classification is necessary to predict its behavior and identify limitations that allow us to make correct management decisions in the agricultural, livestock, forestry, urban, environmental, and…
Data and Info Serving
Tool

TerriaJS is a web application enabling visualization of spatial data in an interactive map. Users can combine multiple datasets in a single view, add own data, split the view in 2 parts and share any …
Data and Info Serving
Guide

This jupyter notebook shows how to process and prepare input data for digital soil mapping (DSM) using the statistical software R. The processing steps are illustrated with a sample dataset from North…
Soil Information User Consideration
Guide

A Guide to Assessing Needs is intended to be a user’s guide for the ill-defined “front end” of development projects that starts with an initial concept and ends with a decision about the best path for…
Data Collection
Guide

The soil reference collection of ISRIC - World Soil Information is a unique resource. It is used for research and display in the World Soil Museum of ISRIC. This report describes the current collectio…
Data collection
Tool

A new open-access field work tool for soil description is now available through ISRIC – World Soil Information: Soil Description DevTool. This tool is for people doing field work who will describe soi…
Data Organisation
Tutorial

The World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) aims to serve the user with a selection of standardised and ultimately harmonised soil profile data. The quality-assessed data may be used to underpin digita…
Laboratory Analysis
Standards

GLOSOLAN globally harmonizes standard operating procedures (SOPs) and make them available online - to all users - for FREE. All our SOPs are compiled in the GLOSOLAN’s Best practice manual, an online …
Data Organisation
Guide

WoSIS™ stands for ‘World Soil Information Service’, a large database based on PostgreSQL + API’s, workflows, dashboards etc., developed and maintained by ISRIC, WDC-Soils. It provide…
Data Organisation
Guide

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—…
Laboratory Analysis
Network

By recognizing the potential of spectral technology in soil analysis and soil mapping and monitoring, GLOSOLAN aims to address the constraints that still hamper the wider uptake of this technology. Ma…
Data Organisation
Network

This engineering report describes the results of the Soil Data Interoperability Experiment (the IE) conducted under the auspices of the OGC Agriculture Domain Working Group in 2015. Soil data exchange…
Data Organisation
Guide

ANZSoilML is an information model that specifies the set of classes, properties, relationships and supporting vocabularies needed to structure digital information used in the Australian and New Zealan…
Applying Soil Information
Tool

The Soil Quality Mobile App (SQAPP) offers an easy-to-use tool that brings global soil data into the decision-making sphere of land users and other interested end users. SQAPP can, for any terrestrial…
Modelling and Mapping
Guide

SoilGrids ™ (hereafter SoilGrids) is a system for global digital soil mapping that makes use of global soil profile information and covariate data to model the spatial distribution of soil properties …
Data and Info Serving
Licenses

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The l…
Data and Info Serving
Standards

This document introduces a generic data model developed at ISRIC implementing the ISO 28258 standard. Furthermore, the data model captures the extensive code-lists gathered in the GloSIS web ontology …
Data Organisation
Guide

Statistical learning refers to a vast set of tools for understanding data. These tools can be classified as supervised or unsupervised. Broadly speaking, supervised statistical learning involves build…
Data and info serving
Guide

The FAIR principles emphasize machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) because humans i…
Modelling and Mapping
Tutorial

The latest SoilGrids release can be accessed through the following services: WMS: access for visualisation and data overview. Instructions for using WMS with commonly used GIS software can be found he…
Data Collection
Standards

Providing information on the soils of the world is an enormous task and this page provides insight about various international standards that exists on the topics of: Collection Management Plans Soil …
Applying Soil Information
Catalogue

The Global Database on Sustainable Land Management (SLM) of WOCAT (The World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies) contains 2449 SLM practices (1460 Technologies, 547 Approaches and 44…
Data Collection
Guide

Scientific research often starts with data collection. However, many researchers pay insufficient attention to this first step in their research. The author, researcher at Wageningen University and Re…
Data Collection
Guide

The Field Book summarizes the present science and art of describing and documenting soils and soilscapes in the USA. The intended audience is professionals who describe soils for various purposes. The…
Data Organisation
Guide

This document was prepared in the framework of ISRIC’s Community of Practice for soil information providers. It outlines basic principles for compiling a profile dataset for consideration in WoSIS (Wo…
Laboratory Analysis
Guide

Laboratory data are critical to the understanding of the properties and genesis of a single pedon, as well as to the understanding of fundamental soil relationships based on many observations of a lar…
Data and Info Serving
Licenses

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, includin…
Laboratory Analysis
Guide

This page attempts to catalogue all freely-downloadable primary soils information usable in a GIS either as ‘points’, lines, polygons or grids (‘rasters’). This compilation has…
Data Organisation
Guide

This document was prepared in the framework of ISRIC’s Community of Practice for soil information providers. It provides a compilation of resources required to compile a Soil and Terrain (SOTER) datab…
Data Organisation
Network

The impact of soil science to the society has probably never been as high as it is currently. The importance of soils in the Earth system must make us, the soil scientists, more noticeable at the EGU.…
Data Organisation
Catalogue

This page attempts to catalogue all freely-downloadable primary soils information usable in a GIS either as ‘points’, lines, polygons or grids (‘rasters’). This compilation has…
Data Organisation
Guide

The standardized SOil and TERrain SOTER methodology has been proposed by the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) as a method to make soils and terrain information available to a wide spectrum …
soil information user considerations
Guide

This document discusses soil information needs in support of studies of environmental, social, and economic sustainability at an increasing fine spatial resolution. https://www.isric.org/sites/default…
Data Organisation
Network

The Global Soil Partnership (GSP) is a globally recognized mechanism established in 2012 with the mission to position soils in the Global Agenda and to promote sustainable soil management. The Partner…
Data Organisation
Network

World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) is an international soil classification system for naming soils and creating legends for soil maps The mission of the Working Group WRB is to test and fur…
Laboratory Analysis
Network

The Global Soil Laboratory Network (GLOSOLAN) was established in 2017 to build and strengthen the capacity of laboratories in soil analysis and to respond to the need for harmonizing soil analytical d…
Data Collection
Guide

The Soil Survey Manual, provides the major principles and practices needed for making and using soil surveys and for assembling and using related data. The term “soil survey” is used here to encompass…
Data Organisation
Guide

Get an overview of the INSPIRE Directive, its founding principles and the maintenance and implementation framework. Find guidance on how to implement and how to benefit from its reuse in different con…
Data Organisation
Standards

A journal article through which the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) principles for data publishing were launched. [map[name:Mark D. Wilkinson et al url:http://orcid.org/0000-…
Data and Info Serving
Tool

The World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) aims to serve the user with a selection of standardised and ultimately harmonised soil profile data. The quality-assessed data may be used to underpin digita…
Data and Info Serving
Guide

The Data and Software Policy of ISRIC — World Soil Information with respect to the management and citation of data, as well as the access and use of software developed by ISRIC. The Data and Software …
Data and info serving
Guide

Description of the importantce of arranging IP, describe which licensing options exist and and providing guidance how to select a suitable license for a data set. Reference to the various open licence…
Data collection
Guide

This report discusses the soil reference collection of ISRIC and its curation in relation to the functions of the World Soil Museum and ISRIC - World Soil Information itself. https://www.isric.org/sit…
Data Collection
Guide

This guidelines provide a complete procedure for soil description and for collecting field data necessary for classification according to second edition of the World Soil Reference Base for Soil Resou…
Data Organisation
Network

The International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) is the global union of soil scientists. The objectives of the IUSS are to promote all branches of soil science, and to support all soil scientists acros…