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.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Last Updated December 25, 2023, 14:52 (UTC)
Created October 25, 2023, 14:16 (UTC)
access_constraints ["Licenced per profile, as specified by data provider and indicated in the data"]
bbox-east-long 178.50
bbox-north-lat 80.00
bbox-south-lat -78.50
bbox-west-long -173.20
contact-email niels.batjes@isric.org
coupled-resource []
dataset-reference-date [{"type": "publication", "value": "2016-07-20"}]
frequency-of-update
graphic-preview-file https://files.isric.org/public/thumbnails/wosis_snapshot/wosis_snapshot.png
guid 76f1bae3-cee1-4bc7-98b2-beb036d88d2b
harvest_object_id 9467a17b-037f-4da6-9ac6-9a456126528a
harvest_source_id 0ac93d1f-9648-4157-af46-766b49f28e1c
harvest_source_title ISRIC Soil Data
licence []
lineage https://www.isric.org/explore/wosis/wosis-contributing-institutions-and-experts
metadata-date 2023-12-08T11:18:44
metadata-language eng
progress Completed
resource-type dataset
responsible-party [{"name": "ISRIC - World Soil Information", "roles": ["Author", "author", "pointOfContact"]}]
spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": [[[-173.2, -78.5], [178.5, -78.5], [178.5, 80.0], [-173.2, 80.0], [-173.2, -78.5]]]}
spatial-data-service-type
spatial-reference-system 4326
spatial_harvester true
temporal-extent-begin 1918-01-01
temporal-extent-end 2013-02-12