ISRIC - World Soil Information, Wageningen UniversityPO Box 353, 6700 AJ Wageningen, the NetherlandsURL: http://www.isric.orgE-mail: {tom.hengl; hannes.reuter; gerard.heuvelink}@wur.nl

Why GSIF?

Global Soil Information Facilities --- is ISRIC's initiative to build Open (publicly available) tools that can be used to enhance collation, harmonization and use of soil and covariate data to assist production and serving of up-to-date global soil information at high resolution (100 m). This global Soil Information System aims at serving global land use planning and global environmental risk assessment activities.

GSIF has been inspired by global environmental data initiatives such as Global Biodiversity Information Facilities, Global Land Cover mapping, OneGeology and similar. The main practical reason for GSIF is to build cyber-infrastructure to collate all existing legacy soil data, currently under threat of being lost forever (!), and add value to such data by using it for mapping and modeling purposes.

The main users of GSIF will potentially be various international agencies and initiatives such as GlobalSoilMap.net and other international agricultural development and research organizations such as FAO, CIAT, USAID, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank. We also aim at National Environmental and Soil Survey agencies, and private entities and individuals, soil surveyors and soil scientists, but also farmers and agriculture engineers.

Key principles

The following general key principles best explain design of GSIF:

Crowd-sourcing --- Data collection in GSIF is based on crowd-sourcing. Everyone collecting soil data or working with soil information is invited to contribute to some of the databases via data portals. These data will then be reviewed and filtered by an international network of soil scientists.

Ownership by authors --- Data entered to GSIF data portals will remain property of the original contributors (copyright holders and/or authors).

FOSS --- GSIF is based on Free and Open Source Software (Linux, PHP, LaTeX, R, GDAL, GRASS, SAGA GIS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Python, Google Earth and similar).

International reference --- Only internationally accepted standards (International System of Units, international soil classifications systems, FAO soil field description guides, WGS84, ISO standards) are supported at the back-end of the system.

Reproducibility --- GSIF is based on automated procedures for mapping, pattern recognition and report/plots generation. All maps and reports produced as a part of GSIF are reproducible without human intervention.

Open Access --- All ISRIC-generated soil field records, output maps and tools used to generate maps will be made publicly available (Open Access) in near real-time.

Hidden complexity --- Complexity (statistical data processing steps, coordinate systems, scale, uncertainty in the maps) will be either hidden from the users or communicated using efficient solutions.

Various GSIF components are being developed by the ISRIC team and collaborators. The most crucial components of GSIF --- Open Soil Profiles, Worldgrids, and GSIF R packages will be publicly released by mid 2012.

Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF)T. Hengl, H.I. Reuter, G.B.M. Heuvelink, N. Batjes, J. Leenaars, P. Tempel

Fig. 1: Schematic example of using a Global Land Information system for site-specific decision making. The future of GSIF is in crowd-sourcing the data input to farmers, agricultural extension

workers, high school pupils, ecologists and similar.

Fig. 2: Proposed Global Soil Information Facilities components and their relations.