Netherlands: A new type of soil property maps for Africa has been launched by ISRIC − World Soil Information in Wageningen, Netherlands. The maps contain predictions of seven soil properties at six standard depths at 1 km resolution. ISRIC has also made the software available to institutions that want to generate their own soil property maps. Knowledge of soil properties such as organic carbon content, clay content and pH is vital for agriculture and climate change analysis in Africa.
ISRIC has made the first version of digital soil property maps, drawing on 12,000 geo-referenced soil profile records from 37 countries. The records were collected from over 300 data sources, ranging from digital databases, books, reports and articles. The legacy soil profiles, together with a large amount of remote-sensing based images of vegetation, climate and terrain relief, were used to estimate the soil properties for the non-desert parts of Africa. The accuracy of the estimates was also calculated.
Source: Science Daily
