Overview of procedures and standards in use at ISRIC WDC-Soils (ISRIC Report)

This report serves to give an overview of main procedures and standards in use at ISRIC – World Soil Information, regular member of the International Science Council (ISC) World Data System (WDS). These cover the whole data life cycle from field sampling to serving quality-assessed soil data to the world community through a range of web services, examples of which are provided. Consistent workflows, procedures and de facto standards are used to screen (QA/QC) and standardise respectively harmonise the wide range of soil-related data that have been shared with us for consideration in our world-covering databases and soil mapping work. Ultimately, these protocols and processes are aimed at facilitating global data interoperability and citability in compliance with FAIR principles: the data should be ‘findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable’. A recent development at ISRIC has been the implementation of a community of practice (CoP) on soil data and information; the workflows, procedures and standards described in this report may be considered as resources for the evolving community of practice.