Abstract
Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security, climate regulation, sustainable energy, desertification and biodiversity protec-tion. As a consequence, soil is becoming one of the top priorities for the global environmental policy agenda. Conventional soil maps suffer from large limita-tions, i.e. most of them are static and often obsolete, are often generated at coarse scale, and can be uneasy to handle. Digital Soil Mapping has been developed as a solution to generate high-resolution maps of soil properties over large areas. Two projects, GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids, presently aim at delivering the first generation of global, high-resolution soil property fine grids. In this paper, we briefly describe the GlobalSoilMap history, its present status and present achievements, and illustrate some of these with (mainly) French examples. At given moment there is still an enormous potential for forthcoming research and for delivering products more helpful for end users. Key here is the continuous progress in available covariates, in their spatial, spectral and temporal coverage and resolution through remote sensing products. All over the world, there is still a very large amount of point soil data still to be rescued and this effort should be pursued and encouraged. Statistically advances are expected by exploring and implementing new models. Especially relevant are spatial-temporal models and contemporary Artificial Intelligence for handling the complex big data. Advances should be made and research efforts are needed on estimating the uncertainties, and even on estimating uncertainties on uncertainties. Attempts to merge different model strategies and products (for instance deriving from different covariates, spatial extents, soil data sources, and models) should be made in order to get the most useful information from each of these predictions, and to identify how controlling factors may change depending on scales.
Highlights
Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security, climate regulation, sustainable energy, desertification and biodiversity protection (Montanarella et al, 2016)
Additional key properties, mainly derived using pedotransfer functions (PTF, see a review from, Minasny and Hartemink, 2011), include bulk density and plant-available water holding capacity. This minimal dataset may be supplemented by other soil attributes on an ad-hoc basis (e.g., P, N and S contents, electric conductivity, soil type, presence of diagnosis horizons, trace elements contents)
One of the most productive years was 2014; with the organization of a dedicated symposium and a business meeting during the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) World Congress of Soil Sciences (WCSS) in Jeju, Korea; the publication of the book of the first GlobalSoilMap conference (Arrouays et al, 2014a), and of a very detailed and highly cited paper (Arrouays et al, 2014b); and an invited keynote talk in a dedicated session and open discussion organized during the IUSS Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) WG conference in Nanjing, China
Summary
Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security, climate regulation, sustainable energy, desertification and biodiversity protection (Montanarella et al, 2016). GlobalSoilMap (Arrouays et al, 2014b) and SoilGrids (Hengl et al, 2014, 2017), presently aim at delivering the first generation of global, highresolution soil property fine grids. The former relies in a bottom-up approach (from country to globe), while the latter uses a top-down approach (a global model that predicts properties for every country). As acquiring new soil data is laborious and expensive, both projects promote the use of existing legacy and heritage soil survey data available across the world These data are being rescued, compiled and processed into a common, consistent and harmonized dataset of relevant soil properties covering the planet’s land surface (Arrouays et al, 2017b). We cite some other examples of achievements and discuss the future and prospects of this project, including the scientific issues still to be solved and the necessary collaboration between projects aiming at delivering similar products
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