Digital Soil Mapping Standards and Specifications for Globalsoilmap.

GlobalSoilMap is a globally coordinated project aimed at producing a set of consistent functional soil properties using digital soil mapping techniques and technology.  The data are designed to be used for better understanding environmental degradation, issues of food security and food production, the importance of soils in biodiversity, the role of soils in areas of water scarcity and quality and for quantifying the effect of soils in climate change.

A globally coordinated set of standards and specifications have been produced to help guide the development of the soils data.  These standards are designed to address the collation and presentation of finalized products, but do not to prescribe how products will be made.  A coordinated dataset based on universally accepted standards will provide soils data that can be used to produce consistent information across geopolitical boundaries.

There are 5 basic tenants to the standards and specifications: (1) the spatial entity, (2) the soil properties to be predicted (and the date associated with the prediction), (3) the uncertainty values for each soil property, (4) the age of the data or information used to estimate the predicted properties, and (5) the validation measure that was used to make the predictions.

The twelve soil properties to be mapped are: (1) total profile depth (cm), (2) plant exploitable or effective soil depth (cm),  (3) organic carbon (g/kg), (4) pH (x10), (5) sand (k/kg), (6) silt (k/kg), (7) clay (k/kg), (8) gravel (m3/m-3), (9) ECEC (cmol/kg),  (10) bulk density of the fine earth (<2mm fraction (excludes gravel) (Mg/m3) and available water capacity (mm).

Various countries around the world are actively applying these standards and specifications to produce soils information.  The project is being coordinated by a global consortium of institutions that are engaged in the production, research, interpretation and application of soils data.  The standards and specifications are being coordinated by the GlobalSoilMap scientific Committee.