Digital Soil Mapping and Asessment for Global Soil Security.

Global Soil Security is one of the major existential issues facing humanity. All of the five dimensions of Soil Security; namely, capability, condition, capital, connectivity and codification are served by uniformly produced and rendered high-resolution soil data with uncertainty; but probably the first two are best served. GlobalSoilMap and later projects attempt such a product. Legacy-data based products, provided they are properly specified, should accommodate an assessment of soil capability. Assessment of soil condition from such global products is very much dependent on the temporal distribution of the legacy data, which is inevitably variable and property dependent. This suggests that GlobalSoilmap and similar products should be used to design updating schemes or monitoring networks to assess and continually estimate soil condition. This will be illustrated with global soil carbon data.