WoSIS snapshot - December 2023

The World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) provides quality-assessed and standardized soil profile data to support digital soil mapping and environmental applications at broad scale levels. Since the release of the ‘WoSIS snapshot 2019’ many new soil data were shared with us, registered in the ISRIC data repository, and subsequently standardized in accordance with the licenses specified by the data providers. The source data were contributed by a wide range of data providers, therefore special attention was paid to the standardization of soil property definitions, soil analytical procedures and soil property values (and units of measurement).

We presently consider the following soil chemical properties (organic carbon, total carbon, total carbonate equivalent, total Nitrogen, Phosphorus (extractable-P, total-P, and P-retention), soil pH, cation exchange capacity, and electrical conductivity) and physical properties (soil texture (sand, silt, and clay), bulk density, coarse fragments, and water retention), grouped according to analytical procedures (aggregates) that are operationally comparable.

For each profile we provide the original soil classification (FAO, WRB, USDA, and version) and horizon designations as far as these have been specified in the source databases.

Three measures for 'fitness-for-intended-use' are provided: positional uncertainty (for site locations), time of sampling/description, and a first approximation for the uncertainty associated with the operationally defined analytical methods. These measures should be considered during digital soil mapping and subsequent earth system modelling that use the present set of soil data.

The current dataset comprises 228k profiles from 217k geo-referenced sites that originate from 174 countries. The profiles represent over 900k soil layers (or horizons) and over 6 million records. The actual number of measurements for each property varies (greatly) between profiles and with depth, this generally depending on the objectives of the initial soil sampling programmes.

The data are provided in TSV (tab separated values) format and as GeoPackage. The zip-file (446 Mb) contains the following files: - Readme_woSIS_202312.pdf - wosis_202312.gpkg (GeoPackage file)
- wosis_202312_observations.tsv - wosis_202312_sites.tsv - wosis_2023112_profiles - wosis_202312_layers - wosis_202312_xxxx.tsv (e.g. wosis_202311_bdfiod.tsv, one for each observation)

For additional information see: https://www.isric.org/explore/wosis/faq-wosis.

Citation: Batjes N.H., Calisto, L. and de Sousa L.M., 2023. Providing quality-assessed and standardised soil data to support global mapping and modelling (WoSIS snapshot 2023). Earth System Science Data (Discussions; https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-14).