Soil Data Assimilation Guidance

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 assimilation has been chosen by the autors as an alternative to the terms harmonisation and standardisation, which already have a specific meaning in the soil domain:

• standardisation; aligning soil data to a common model, using common codelists.
• harmonisation; transforming results from observations and measurements to values as if all results for a property are measured using the same procedure, by applying so called Pedotransfer Functions (PTF).

The process of assimilation also aims to capture additional aspects, such as finding, downloading and using the data. Most of these aspects are also well described as part of the FAIR principles.

The “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community” (INSPIRE) directive has been and is an important effort for standardisation in the environmental data domain, therefore this wiki has many links to INSPIRE sources. Because INSPIRE adopts industry standards, this wiki does reference common standards from ISO (International Organization for Standardization), Open Geospatial Consortium, Global Soils Partnership, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), giving it a global relevance.

This guide was initiatied by ISRIC - World Soil Information and Wageningen Environmental Research as part of the European Joint Program on Soil (EJP Soil) with funding from the European Union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 862695.