WoSIS snapshot - July 2016

The aim of the World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) is to serve quality-assessed, geo-referenced soil data (point, polygon, and grid) to the international community upon their standardisation and harmonisation. So far, the focus has been on developing procedures for legacy point data with special attention to the selection of soil analytical and physical properties considered in the GlobalSoilMap specifications (e.g. organic carbon, soil pH, soil texture (sand, silt, and clay), coarse fragments ( greater than  2 mm), cation exchange capacity, electrical conductivity, bulk density, and water holding capacity). Profile data managed in WoSIS were contributed by a wide range of soil data providers; the data have been described, sampled, and analysed according to methods and standards in use in the originating countries. Hence, special attention was paid to measures for soil data quality and the standardisation of soil property definitions, soil property values, and soil analytical method descriptions.

At the time of writing, the full WoSIS database contained some 118 400 unique shared soil profiles, of which some 96 000 are geo-referenced within defined limits. In total, this corresponds with over 31 million soil records, of which some 20 % have so far been quality-assessed and standardised using the sequential procedure discussed in this paper.

The number of measured data for each property varies between profiles and with depth, generally depending on the purpose of the initial studies. Overall, the data lineage strongly determined which data could be standardised with acceptable confidence in accord with WoSIS procedures, corresponding to over 4 million records for 94 441 profiles.

The downloadable ZIP file has the data in TSV (tab separated values). It contains the following files:

- ReadmeFirst_WoSIS_2016.pdf (148.1 KB)

- wosis_201607_attributes.txt (4.1 KB)

- wosis_201607_layers.txt (679.1 MB)

- wosis_201607_profiles.txt (8.8 MB)

Citation:

Batjes NH, Ribeiro E, van Oostrum A, Leenaars J, and Mendes de Jesus J 2016. Standardised soil profile data for the world (WoSIS, July 2016 snapshot), doi:10.17027/isric-wdcsoils.20160003.

The dataset accompanies the following data paper: Batjes NH, Ribeiro E, van Oostrum A, Leenaars J, Hengl T, and Mendes de Jesus J 2017. WoSIS: Providing standardised soil profile data for the world, Earth System Science Data 9, 1-14, doi:10.5194/essd-9-1-2017.

Date (Publication): 2016-07-20

Citation identifier: 76f1bae3-cee1-4bc7-98b2-beb036d88d2b

Citation identifier: doi: / 10.17027/isric-wdcsoils.20160003

Presentation form: Digital map

Status: Completed

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
ISRIC - World Soil Information	Ad van Oostrum		Author
ISRIC - World Soil Information	Niels Batjes	niels.batjes@isric.org	Author
ISRIC - World Soil Information	Eloi Ribeiro		Author
ISRIC - World Soil Information	Data infodesk	data@isric.org	Point of contact

Theme

bulk density
cation exchange capacity
soil classification
coarse fragments
clay
effective cation exchange capacity
electrical conductivity
organic carbon
pH
sand
silt
calcium carbonate
texture
water retention
soil profiles

Stratum

Soil science

Region

Global

Access constraints: License

Use constraints: License

Other constraints: Licenced per profile, as specified by data provider and indicated in the data

Spatial representation type: Vector

Denominator: 100000

Language: English

Character set: UTF8

Topic category

Geoscientific information

Begin date: 1918-01-01

End date: 2013-02-12

Reference system identifier: EPSG / 4326

Distribution format

Name	Version
Niels H. Batjes

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
ISRIC - World Soil Information			Resource provider

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:DOWNLOAD-1.0-ftp--download	https://files.isric.org/public/wosis_snapshot/WoSIS_2016_July.zip	Download zip
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--related	https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-1-2017	Scientific paper
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--related	https://www.isric.org/explore/wosis/faq-wosis	Project webpage