Project GLADSOILMAP

Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security, climate regulation, sustainable energy, desertification and biodiversity protection. All these issues require accurate national and global soil property information and there is a need for a scientific support to develop reliable baseline soil information and pathways for measuring and monitoring soils. Soil sustainable management is a global issue, but effective actions require high-resolution data about soil properties.

Two projects, GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids, aim at delivering the first generation of high-resolution soil property grids for the globe, the first one by a bottom-up approach (from country to globe), the latter by top-down (global). The GLobAl Digital SOIL MAP (GLADSOILMAP) consortium brings together world scientific leaders involved in both projects.

This consortium aims at developing and transferring methods to improve the prediction accuracy of soil properties and their associated uncertainty, by using legacy soil data and ancillary spatial information. This novel approach brings together new technologies and methods, existing soil databases and expert knowledge.
This federative consortium aims at transferring methods to achieve convergence between top-down and bottom-up approaches, and to generate methods for delivering maps of soil properties. These maps are essential for communities from climate and environmental modeling to decision-making and sustainable resources management at a scale that is relevant to soil management. The consortium will ensure links with the numerous actors in geosciences of the world, and will contribute to improving their skills in digital mapping and their national and international legibility.

From a global policy point of view, the consortium will bring a major contribution to the implementation of the priorities of the United Nations’ Global Soil Partnership, Pillar 4.

The INRAE InfoSol Unit is coordinating the consortium. Its International partners are : Wageningen University (NL), USDA-NCRS (US), ISRIC-World Soil Information (NL), Sydney University (AU) and Landcare Research (NZ). Other French collaborators are : UR Sols d'INRAE (Orléans), l'UMR LISAH INRAE-IRD-Institut Agro (Montpellier) and BRGM (Orléans).

Funding: LE STUDIUM Région Centre (Orléans)

Beginning year: novembre 2019

Duration: 3 ans