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Knowledge of the world’s soil resources is fragmented
and dated. The
modelling community, farmers, land users, and policy and
decision makers
need accurate, up-to-date and spatially referenced soil
information. This
need coincides with major advances in technologies for the
prediction of soil
properties.
GlobalSoilMap.net is a new global project that aims to make
a new digital
soil map. Alex McBratney from the University of Sydney in
Australia
enthuses about the new map, “The global digital soil map
will use advances
in technologies including remote sensing, data mining and
spatial databases,
and our improved scientific understanding of soil, for
accurate prediction
and sampling of soil properties. The new maps will replace
the beautiful
coloured paper soil maps developed in the last century which
depicted soil
types and which were largely qualitative and somewhat fixed
depictions of
soil distribution. Digital soil maps, with their infinity of
shades and colours
and ways of presentation are essentially spatial information
systems of soil
properties key to the soil’s sustainable productivity and
ecosystem function.
Digital soil maps are quantitative and dynamic and are in
tune with the needs
of scientists, policy makers and government officials. In a
sense their use is
only limited by the imagination of potential users. It is
truly thrilling to be
part of such a global enterprise.”
Work has started in sub-Saharan Africa, through an $18
million grant
awarded to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture
(CIAT) from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a
Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to create the Africa Soil
Information Service
(AfSIS). “The best science and technology available must be
deployed
immediately if Africa’s soils are to be managed in a
sustainable manner. Let
there be no mistake about the significance of this wonderful
project,” said
Kofi Annan, chairman of AGRA and former UN
Secretary-General, in a
recent statement. “This initiative will provide farmers,
policy makers, and scientists crucial information on how to
address declining soil fertility in regions such as
sub-Saharan Africa,” explains Pedro Sanchez, director of
AfSIS. “Soil mapping can help with that because it is one of
the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development,”
according to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute
at Columbia University (USA) and special advisor to
the UN Secretary-General.
The map will have many uses in different parts of the world.
Neil McKenzie,
the Chief Land and Water of CSIRO in Australia states that:
“In Oceania,
reliable soil information is needed to assess and improve
the efficiency of
rain-fed and irrigated agriculture. The challenge of food
security and human
nutrition is a major issue and there is an urgent need to
minimise exploitative
land uses and soil degradation (especially through erosion
and acidification).
The region is very vulnerable to climate change and soil
information is
essential for planning major shifts in land-use, for
example, in southern
Australia where water scarcity is already a problem. As with
other parts of
the world, the best soils for biosequestration of carbon
have to be located.”
The GlobalSoilMap.net project will foster collaboration
between institutions
in Canada, Mexico and the USA to produce soil property data
that is transnational
in nature, according to Jon Hempel, Co-Director-National
Geospatial Development Center of the National Resource
Conservation
Service in the USA. Jon Hempel: “Legacy and heritage soil
survey data
holdings across North America that have been produced at
different scales
and under different taxonomic systems will be harmonized
into a common,
consistent and geographically contiguous dataset of soil
properties. It will
allow scientists and officials to more easily make
application of the data for
many interpretive uses across the North American continent.”
The GlobalSoilMap.net consortium, which is led by ISRIC -
World Soil
Information (Wageningen, Netherlands), includes the Joint
Research Centre
of the European Commission (Ispra, Italy), CSIRO (Canberra,
Australia), the
University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Institute of Soil
Science of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nanjing, China), the Earth
Institute at
Columbia University (New York, USA), the US Department of
Agriculture -
Natural Resources Conservation Service (Morgantown, USA),
IRD
(Montpellier, France), the Brazilian Agricultural Research
Corporation
(Embrapa, Rio de Janeiro) and CIAT-TSBF (Nairobi, Kenya).
http://www.globalsoilmap.net
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