Getting to know ISRIC’s focus areas of expertise

At ISRIC, our mission is to generate, curate, and disseminate high-quality soil knowledge and make that knowledge usable for decision makers, researchers, and practitioners worldwide. The five focus areas described below form the pillars and strategic pathway of our work.

This focus area centres on preserving, curating, and educating through physical soil reference collections and legacy documentation. ISRIC is custodian of the World Soil Reference Collection — a globally unique collection of undisturbed soil monoliths that are documented, analysed, and made available for research, correlation, and teaching. The World Soil Museum showcases these soils to the public via exhibits and guided tours, bringing soil diversity and function to life while enhancing soil literacy for students, policymakers, and citizens. In parallel, the World Soil Library of Maps and Reports preserves over 27,000 records of legacy soil information, including 10,000 soil maps and 17,000 books and reports. Complementing those is the ISRIC Data Collection, which brings together legacy and contemporary datasets for public access.

This area is about safeguarding soil heritage, providing foundational reference samples, and educating people about soils.

This focus area is about developing and maintaining standards for soil information development. Focus is on standardising ontologies and vocabularies for soil data and further developing the World Reference Base for Soil Resources, an international system for the classification of soils worldwide.

Once soil data are collected and harmonised, they must be transformed into standardised, predictive, spatial products. That is the purpose of this focus area. ISRIC collects, assesses, and harmonises soil profile data on physical and chemical properties, then uses those as input to generate global and continental soil information.

Two key flagship products stand out:

• WoSIS (World Soil Information Service) is a central, quality‐assessed global soil database, which holds 230,000 geo-referenced profiles from 174 countries, representing over 900,000 soil layers and millions of individual records.

• SoilGrids is a digital soil mapping engine, producing gridded global maps of soil attributes such as pH, organic carbon, bulk density, texture, and moisture.

These products allow scientists and decision makers to “map” soil across regions and continents, quantify uncertainties, and provide consistent, comparable information across national boundaries. This information supports decision-making for soil’s critical role in food security, water management, climate regulation, biodiversity, raw material supply and cultural heritage.

This focus area is about strengthening Soil Information Systems (SIS) at national, regional and continental levels. To support the development of SIS, key initiatives include:

• A Community of Practice for Soil Information Providers, enabling knowledge exchange and peer learning.

• An open-access Soil Information Resource Library with tools and guidance for each component of the Soil Information Workflow. An example of these tools is the SIS Framework to design and build a context-specific SIS.

• ISRIC Academy, which delivers structured online training for capacity strengthening.

While ISRIC supports national systems, especially in Africa and the Global South, it also assists regional and continental integration, ensuring alignment to international standards.

This focus area emphasises the development of spatial information products that support the adequate management and use of specific soils and can be used by (AI based) decision support services. ISRIC also engages in projects that aim to further develop decision support tools for SLM.

Further, ISRIC contributes to the formulation of soil health indicators and uses these in the development of spatial soil health information products.