International Soil Reference and Information Centre

(ISRIC - World Soil Information)

ISRIC - World Soil Information is an independent, science-based foundation. The institute was founded in 1966 following a recommendation of the International Society of Soil Science (ISSS, now International Union of Soil Sciences| (IUSS)) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It has a mission to serve the international community with information about the world’s soil resources to help addressing major global issues.

Recent developments at ISRIC are succinctly described in a series of Annual Highlights.

In collaboration with partners, ISRIC operates in three priority areas:

Our reference collection includes country documentation (reports, maps and slides), soil specimens (monoliths, samples, thin sections, hand 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 (point, polygon, and raster). Since 2010, ISRIC has been developing GSIF (Global Soil Information Facilities) a framework 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 (SoilGrids) produced using automated soil mapping based on machine learning algorithms.

Our on-line resources can be accessed via:

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 ICSU-WDS, ISRIC is still known as the WDC-Soils.

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