AnnualReport2020

PARTNERS
Dr Dominique Arrouays
CONSORTIUM COORDINATOR
Dr Zamir Libohova
United States Department of
Agriculture - Natural Resources
Conservation Service – USA
Dr Laura Poggio
International Soil Reference and
Information Centre - World Soil
Information – NL
Dr Vera Leatitia Mulder
Wageningen University – NL
SMART LOIRE VALLEY
Dr Dominique Arrouays is a senior research Engineer at the InfoSol Unit, INRAE, Orléans, France. He had been the head of the unit
from 2000 to 2011. He has been member of the IPCC who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. He has 175 publications in the Web
of Science (WoS) and an h-index of 47. He is member of the editorial board of several international scientific journals. He got the gold
medal of the French Academy of Agriculture (2014) and was awarded several “best papers” in scientific journals. He is Chairman of the
“GlobalSoilMap” Working Group (WG) of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS), which is working on the “bottom-up” approach
for generating fine grids of soil properties. He has been recently nominated member of the Pilar 4 WG (soil information) of the FAO-UN
Global Soil Partnership.
GLADSOILMAP (GLOBAL DIGITAL SOIL MAP)
Dr Pierre Roudier
Landcare Research – NZ
Prof. Budiman Minasny
University of Sydney – AU
Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security, climate regulation, sustainable energy,
desertification and biodiversity protection. All these examples require accurate national soil property information and
there is a need to scientific support to develop reliable baseline soil information and pathways for measuring and
monitoring soils. Soil sustainable management is a global issue, but effective actions require high-resolution data about
soil properties.
Two projects, GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids, aim at delivering the first generation of high-resolution soil property grids
for the globe, the first one by a bottom-up approach (from country to globe), the latter by top-down (global). The GLobAl
Digital SOIL MAP (GLADSOILMAP) consortium brings together world scientific leaders involved in both projects. The
consortium aims at developing and transferring methods to improve the prediction accuracy of soil properties and their
associated uncertainty, by using legacy soil data and ancillary spatial information. This approach brings together new
technologies and methods, existing soil databases and expert knowledge.
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The consortium aims at transferring methods to achieve convergence between top-down and bottom-up approaches,
and to generate methods for delivering maps of soil properties. These maps are essential for communities from climate
and environmental modeling to decision-making and sustainable resources management at a scale that is relevant to soil
management. The consortium will ensure links with the numerous actors in geosciences of the world, and will contribute
to improving their skills in digital mapping and their national and international legibility. The consortium involves very
experienced soil scientists and younger ones well aware of up to date technologies and methods in DSM. It covers the
entire world, which is a guarantee that the results will be largely disseminated and used.
Achievements to date include the first kick-off meeting held in Orléans in November 2019, and a related detailed plan
of actions and several video-meetings in 2020. The website is operational. Three members of the consortium are
finishing editing a special issue of a scientific journal (only the introductive paper remains to write). Numerous articles
were published in the framework of this consortium, covering various parts of the world and various methodological
approaches. The Consortium GLADSOILMAP has been presented to the Scientific Council and the international
researchers of “LE STUDIUM” in Orléans, France, June 16th 2020. Progress have been presented in an invited conference
to Zeijhang University, China, end of 2019. In 2020, due to Covid-19, face-to-face meetings and travels to Orléans of the
members were cancelled, and the STUDIUM decided to extend the consortium duration for one more year.
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