International Soil Reference and Information Centre


Mission

, legally registered as the International Soil Reference and Information Centre, is an independent, science-based foundation.
The institute was founded in 1966 following a recommendation of the International Society of Soil Science and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It has a mission to serve the international community with information about the world’s soil resources to help addressing major global issues.

Main focus areas

Recent developments at ISRIC are succinctly described in a series of Annual Highlights.
Together with partners, ISRIC produces, gathers, compiles and serves quality-assessed soil information at global, national and regional levels. Work is organised according to 4 workstreams: Setting Standards and References, Soil Information Provisioning, Capacity Building and Advocacy, and Derived products.
ISRIC stimulate the use of this information to address global challenges through capacity building, awareness raising and direct cooperation with users and clients. Details are provided on the following website .

Data holdings and webservices

Our reference collection includes country documentation, soil specimens. Physical examples of our soil monolith collection are on permanent display in the World Soil Museum.
ISRIC also manages and develops geo-referenced databases. Since 2010, ISRIC has been developing its cyber- infrastructure for safeguarding, handling and producing of open soil data. Freely available products provided by ISRIC include a set of standardised soil profile data for the world served from WoSIS and a collection of updatable soil property and class maps of the world at 1 km and 250 m spatial resolution produced using semi-automated soil mapping based on machine learning algorithms.
Our on-line resources can be accessed via:

World Data Centre for Soils (WDC - Soils)

ISRIC became a regular member of the ICSU World Data System in 2011; it has been a member of the former ICSU World Data Center since 1989. Within the ISC World Data System, ISRIC is still known as the '.
Re-accreditation as a regular ICS-WDS member is on a three yearly basis, and this includes certification as a ' trustworth repository.

Useful links