Anne C. Richer-de-Forges

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Department of Environment and Agronomy

In 2023, the European Commission released a legislative proposal for a Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience which aims to define a legal framework to achieve healthy soils across the European Union (EU) by 2050. A key component of the initial Directive is the mandate for Member States to establish basic geographic soil governance units, refe...

The direction and magnitude of soil organic carbon stock (SOCS) change following land use and land cover change (LULCC) are highly uncertain, largely due to the lack of relevant global soil data. Great efforts have been made to build SOCS database at regional, national and even sub-continental scales following LULCC; however, a comprehensive and op...

Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are increasingly being used to derive difficult-to-measure or cost prohibitive soil properties from more readily available soil data. Soil texture (ST) is one of the most commonly used predictors in PTFs. Soil texture can be determined in the laboratory or estimated manually by soil surveyors in the field. Soil texture...

We provide six short building blocks to devise adaptable soil definitions. These buiding blocks start from a simple and straightforward metaphor and progressively evolve when adopting geophysical, analytical, biogeochemical, cultural, and services driven points of view. These progressive changes end up with a straightforward, yet most important mes...

Soil compaction is one of the most important and readily mitigated threats to soil health. Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) has emerged as an efficient method to provide broad-scale maps by combining soil information with environmental covariates. Until now, soil information input to DSM has been mainly composed of point-based quantitative measurements o...

Soils are a finite resource that is under threat, mainly due to human pressure. Therefore, there is an urgent need to produce maps of soil properties, functions and behaviors that can support land management and various stakeholders' decisions. Compaction is a major threat to soil functions, such as water infiltration and storage, and crops' root g...

Soil bulk density (BD) serves as a fundamental indicator of soil health and quality, exerting a significant influence on critical factors such as plant growth, nutrient availability, and water retention. Due to its limited availability in soil databases, the application of pedotransfer functions (PTFs) has emerged as a potent tool for predicting BD...

Soil bulk density (BD) serves as a fundamental indicator of soil health and quality, exerting a significant influence on critical factors such as plant growth, nutrient availability, and water retention. Due to its limited availability in soil databases, the application of pedotransfer functions (PTFs) has emerged as a potent tool for predicting BD...

Digital soil mapping (DSM) is commonly conducted using input soil attributes derived from laboratory analyses of geographically referenced samples. Field observations are often abundant and can offer a dense source of soil data that has the potential to enhance DSM predictions. However, they are not widely used due to to concerns about subjectivity...

Digital maps of soil properties are now widely available. End-users now can access several digital soil mapping (DSM) products of soil properties, produced using different models, calibration/training data, covariates and at various spatial scales from global to local. Therefore, there is an urgent need to provide easy-to-understand tools to commun...

Soils are at the crossroads of many existential issues that humanity is currently facing. Soils are a finite resource that is under threat, mainly due to human pressure. There is an urgent need to map and monitor them at field, regional, and global scales in order to improve their management and prevent their degradation. This remains a challenge d...

Satellite-based soil organic carbon content (SOC) mapping over wide regions is generally hampered by the low soil sampling density and the diversity of soil sampling periods. Some unfavorable topsoil conditions, such as high moisture, rugosity, the presence of crop residues, the limited amplitude of SOC values and the limited area of bare soil when...

In the context of increasing soil degradation worldwide, spatially explicit soil information is urgently needed to support decision-making for sustaining limited soil resources. Digital soil mapping (DSM) has been proven as an efficient way to deliver soil information from local to global scales. The number of environmental covariates used for DSM...

Soil inorganic carbon (SIC) contributes to up to half of the terrestrial C stock and is especially significant in arid and semi-arid environments, yet has not been explored as much as soil organic carbon (SOC). SIC plays an important role in agriculture, CO2 sequestration and emission and climate regulation. To address this, a comprehensive review...

Soil inorganic carbon (SIC) contributes to up to half of the terrestrial C stock and is especially significant in arid and semi-arid environments, yet has not been explored as much as soil organic carbon (SOC). SIC plays an important role in agriculture, CO2 sequestration and emission and climate regulation. To address this, a comprehensive review...

Les sols sont au carrefour d’enjeux planétaires majeurs. L’importance d’une gestion raisonnée et durable des sols est ainsi de plus en plus reconnue au niveau mondial. Il en est logiquement de même en ce qui concerne la nécessité de constituer des systèmes d’information harmonisés, locaux, nationaux, continentaux et mondiaux sur les sols et leurs p...

As digital soil mapping (DSM) applications have been developed at multiple extents over the two last decades, large areas of the world are now covered by several DSM products with similar resolution and targeted soil properties. Thus, from these products, end-users must carefully select the one that will best meet their needs. The aim of this study...

http://www.pedometrics.org/Pedometron/Pedometron46.pdf

Soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration is a promising natural climate solution for capturing atmospheric CO2, and it provides crucial co-benefits in improving soil functions and services at the same time. Given that SOC is not a single and uniform entity, a deep understanding of SOC response to environmental changes requires additional information...

Citation: Vaudour, E.; Gholizadeh, A.; Castaldi, F.; Saberioon, M.; Borůvka, L.; Urbina-Salazar, D.; Fouad, Y.; Arrouays, D.; Richer-de-Forges, A.C.; Biney, J.; et al. Satellite

Due to cost constraints, field texture classes estimated by hand-feel by soil surveyors are more abundant than laboratory measurements of particle-size distribution. Thus, there is a considerable potential to use field-estimated soil textures for mapping on the condition that they are reliable and can be characterized by a probability distribution...

Soils are essential for supporting food production and providing ecosystem services but are under pressure due to population growth, higher food demand, and land use competition. Because of the effort to ensure the sustainable use of soil resources, demand for current, updatable soil information capable of supporting decisions across scales is incr...

In agronomy, soil organic carbon (SOC) content is important for the development and growth of crops. From an environmental monitoring viewpoint, SOC sequestration is essential for mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. SOC dynamics in cropland soils should be further studied through various approaches including remote sens...

Soil Security includes dimensions, soil capability, soil condition, soil capital, soil connectivity and soil codification (the “five C's”). This article provides a short review on how soil mapping, digital soil mapping and soil monitoring systems (SM, DSM and SMS) over large areas contribute to these five C's at scales ranging from country to globe...

The soil science community needs to communicate about soils and the use of soil information to various audiences, especially to the general public and public authorities. In this global review article, we synthesis information pertaining to museums solely dedicated to soils or which contain a permanent exhibition on soils. We identified 38 soil mus...

The density of soil observations is a major determinant of digital soil mapping (DSM) prediction accuracy. In this study, we investigated the effect of soil sampling density on the performance of DSM to predict topsoil particle-size distribution in the Mayenne region of France. We tested two prediction algorithms, namely ordinary kriging (OK) and q...

The soil science community needs to communicate about soils and the use of soil information to various audiences, especially to the general public and public authorities. In this global review article, we synthesis information pertaining to museums solely dedicated to soils or which contain a permanent exhibition on soils. We identified 38 soil mus...

The need for soil data has largely increased worldwide given the growing general concern about the maintenance and recovery of ecosystem resources and services. The development of digital soil mapping (DSM) is often seen as a means for answering this demand. In France, the national soil mapping strategy has been defined in the early 1990s within th...

The soil science community needs to communicate about soils and the use of soil information to various audiences, especially to the general public and public authorities. In this global review article, we synthesis information pertaining to museums solely dedicated to soils or which contain a permanent exhibition on soils. We identified 38 soil mus...

Soil thickness (ST) plays an important role in regulating soil processes, vegetation growth and land suitability. Therefore, it has been listed as one of twelve basic soil properties to be delivered in GlobalSoilMap project. However, ST prediction has been reported with poor performance in previous studies. Our case study is located in the intensiv...

During the last 10 years, several attempts to map soil attributes at the scale of mainland France have been realised. We exemplify them by seven major outputs: maps of organic C stocks, trace elements (TE), microbial density and diversity, soil thickness, available water capacity (AWC), extractable P, and changes in soil pH. We first briefly descri...

Parent material is a crucial co-variate in predicting soil properties using digital soil mapping (DSM) methods. This spatial information can be obtained using available lithology maps, or using proxies such as gamma-ray spectroscopic maps. In this study, we used random forests to predict topsoil texture (clay, silt, and sand in grams per kilogram)...

Since the turn of the millennium, digital soil mapping (DSM) has revolutionized the production of fine resolution gridded soil data with associated uncertainty. However, the link to conventional soil maps has not been sufficiently explained nor are the approaches complementary and synergistic. Further training on the digital soil mapping approaches...

Soil clay content is a key parameter that influences many other soil properties and processes. The potential of adding new and contemporary satellite data for soil property mapping in France is assessed in this study. The soil property maps used for this analysis were produced within the framework of GlobalSoilMap, which was created to deliver glob...

Soil thickness (ST) is a crucial factor in earth surface modelling and soil storage capacity calculations (e.g., available water capacity and carbon stocks). However, the observed depths recorded in soil information systems for some profiles are often less than the actual ST (i.e., right censored data). The use of such data will negatively affect m...

The 1:250,000 soil mapping program of France is nearly complete. Although mapping has been conducted using conventional methods, there is a discernible need to obtain more precise soil data using other methods, and this is attracting considerable attention. However, it is currently not possible to implement a conventional and systematic program thr...

Référentiel Régional Pédologique de la région Nouvelle-Aquitaine : notice explicative de la carte des pédopaysages au 1/250 000e du département des Landes

Référentiel Régional Pédologique de la région Nouvelle-Aquitaine : notice explicative de la carte des pédopaysages au 1/250 000e du département de la Gironde

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 s...

Soil properties have a very high spatial variability; to manage them better, it is necessary to produce a mapping inventory. This chapter discusses the capacity of French observation mechanisms to collect relevant data on different scales for the inventory and monitoring of soils in France. Ahead of the global issues posed by soil management, in 20...

Legacy soil data have been produced over 70 years in nearly all countries of the world. Unfortunately, data, information and knowledge are still currently fragmented and at risk of getting lost if they remain in a paper format. To process this legacy data into consistent, spatially explicit and continuous global soil information, data are being res...

The '4 per mille Soils for Food Security and Climate' was launched at the COP21 with an aspiration to increase global soil organic matter stocks by 4 per 1000 (or 0.4 %) per year as a compensation for the global emissions of greenhouse gases by anthropogenic sources. This paper surveyed the soil organic carbon (SOC) stock estimates and sequestratio...

The demand for information on functional soil properties is high and has increased over time. This is especially true for soil organic carbon (SOC) in the framework of food security and climate change. The GlobalSoilMap consortium was established in response to such a soaring demand for up-to-date and relevant soil information. The majority of the...

Revue officielle de la société géologique de France

The demand for information on functional soil properties is high and has increased over time. This is especially true for soil organic carbon (SOC) in the framework of food security and climate change. The GlobalSoilMap consortium was established in response to such a soaring demand for up-to-date and relevant soil information. The majority of the...

This work evaluated two different digital soil mapping methods for mapping the presence of iron pans in South-West France. The presence of iron pans limit rooting depth, thereby affecting available water content for plants and increasing vulnerability of trees to storms. In some cases, it may also limit the water infiltration rate and cause anaerob...

This work presents the first GlobalSoilMap (GSM) products for France. We developed an automatic procedure for mapping the primary soil properties (clay, silt, sand, coarse elements, pH, soil organic carbon (SOC), cation exchange capacity (CEC) and soil depth). The procedure employed a data-mining technique and a straightforward method for estimatin...

This work presents the first high-resolution map of soil organic carbon (SOC) in mainland France, including soils below 30 cm. The research was performed within the framework of GlobalSoilMap (GSM). SOC predictions for different depth layers (0–5 cm, 5–15 cm, 15–30 cm, 30–60 cm, 60–100 cm and > 100 cm) were made at 90 and 500 m resolution for mainl...

The objective of this work was to compare three spatially explicit modeling approaches for soil depth (SD) for France (540 K km2), produced using: i) a straight forward digital soil mapping (DSM) approach, based on regression treemodeling (RTM), ii) gradient boosting modeling (GBM), and iii) multi-resolution kriging (MrK) for large datasets. SD was...

Le programme de cartographie des sols du territoire français à moyennes échelles (« Connaissance Pédologique de la France » : CPF) lancé en 1968, constitue un volet du programme Inventaire, Gestion et Conservation des Sols (IGCS) du Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique Sol (GIS Sol). Il a permis de couvrir environ 24 % du territoire par la cartographi...

In this work we aimed at developing a conceptual framework in which we improve our understanding of the controlling factors for soil organic carbon (SOC) over vast areas at different depths. We postulated that variability in SOC may be better explained by modelling SOC within soil-landscape systems (SLSs). The study was performed in mainland France...