Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 299–320, 2020 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-299-2020 © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Standardised soil profile data to support global mapping and modelling (WoSIS snapshot 2019) Niels H. Batjes, Eloi Ribeiro, and Ad van Oostrum ISRIC – World Soil Information, Wageningen, 6708 PB, the Netherlands Correspondence: Niels H. Batjes (
[email protected]) Received: 6 September 2019 – Discussion started: 16 September 2019 Revised: 17 December 2019 – Accepted: 9 January 2020 – Published: 10 February 2020 Abstract. The World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) provides quality-assessed and standardised soil profile data to support digital soil mapping and environmental applications at broadscale levels. Since the release of the first “WoSIS snapshot”, in July 2016, many new soil data were shared with us, registered in the ISRIC data repos- itory and subsequently standardised in accordance with the licences specified by the data providers. Soil profile data managed in WoSIS were contributed by a wide range of data providers; therefore, special attention was paid to measures for soil data quality and the standardisation of soil property definitions, soil property values (and units of measurement) and soil analytical method descriptions. We presently consider the following soil chemi- cal properties: organic carbon, total carbon, total carbonate equivalent, total nitrogen, phosphorus (extractable P, total P and P retention), soil pH, cation exchange capacity and electrical conductivity. We also consider the fol- lowing physical properties: soil texture (sand, silt, and clay), bulk density, coarse fragments and water retention. Both of these sets of properties are grouped according to analytical procedures that are operationally comparable.