
Niels H. BatjesISRIC - World Soil Information | ISRIC · World Data Centre for Soils (WDC-Soils)
Niels H. Batjes
F.I. Soil Sci.
About
291
Publications
209,519
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
24,639
Citations
Introduction
Senior soil science expert and Coordinator of the World Data Centre for Soils (WDC-Soils) with special responsibility for the DATA (WoSIS) project and member of SoilGrids team.
Research interests: soil carbon stocks and change (in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation), sustainable land management, soil data standardisation / harmonisation / analysis for continental and global environmental assessments, land quality indicators, as well as area-class and digital soil mapping.
Additional affiliations
January 1991 - December 2005
Publications
Publications (291)
Soil carbon (C) is a critical component of Earth system models (ESMs) and its diverse representations are a major source of the large spread across models in the terrestrial C sink from the 3rd to 5th assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Improving soil C projections is of a high priority for Earth system model...
Present global maps of soil water retention (SWR) are mostly derived from pedotransfer functions (PTFs) applied to maps of other basic soil properties. As an alternative, ‘point-based’ mapping of soil water content can improve global soil data availability and quality. We developed point-based global maps with estimated uncertainty of the volumetri...
Snapshots derived from the World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) are served freely to the international community. These static datasets provide quality-assessed and standardised soil profile data that can be used to support digital soil mapping and environmental applications at broad scale levels. Since the release of the preceding snapshot in 20...
Soils are the largest terrestrial reservoir of organic carbon, yet they are easily degraded. Consistent and accurate monitoring of changes in soil organic carbon stocks and net greenhouse gas emissions, reporting, and their verification is key to facilitate investment in sustainable land use practices that maintain or increase soil organic carbon s...
The soil is important in sequestering atmospheric CO2 and in emitting trace gases (e.g. CO2, CH4 and N2O) that are radiatively active and enhance the ‘greenhouse’ effect. Land use changes and predicted global warming, through their effects on net primary productivity, the plant community and soil conditions, may have important effects on the size o...
Snapshots derived from the World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) are served freely to the international community. These static datasets provide quality-assessed and standardised soil profile data that can be used to support digital soil mapping and environmental applications at broad scale levels. Since the release of the preceding snapshot in 20...
Access to data can facilitate better informed decision making. A soil information system (SIS) is used to efficiently use, produce, organize, analyse, and serve soil data and information in a country, region or at any other scale. The report 'Development options for a Soil Information Workflow and System' offers an aid for designing a SIS for soil...
The primary aim of this review is to provide an inventory of current MRV initiatives with a focus on croplands, grasslands and forests, and to evaluate their main characteristics along the lines recommended by the CIRCASA project (Smith et al. 2020). This will serve to identify possible ‘building blocks’ and associated methodologies for a ‘cookbook...
The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical properties of soils at approximately 1 km resolution. Its main objective is to be useful for modelers and to serve as a basis for prospective studies on agroecological zoning, food security a...
This report serves to give an overview of main procedures and standards in use at ISRIC – World Soil Information, regular member of the International Science Council (ISC) World Data System (WDS). These cover the whole data life cycle from field sampling to serving quality-assessed soil data to the world community through a range of web services, e...
SoilGrids produces maps of soil properties for the entire globe at medium spatial resolution (250 m cell size) using state-of-the-art machine learning methods to generate the necessary models. It takes as inputs soil observations from about 240 000 locations worldwide and over 400 global environmental covariates describing vegetation, terrain morph...
There is a growing demand for high‐quality soil data. However, soil measurements are subject to many error sources. We aimed to quantify uncertainties in synthetic and real‐world wet chemistry soil data through a linear mixed‐effects model, including batch and laboratory effects. The use of synthetic data allowed us to investigate how accurately th...
> The '2020 Procedures Manual' describes the rationale and workflows for handling, quality-assessing and standardising soil profile data in ISRIC's World Soil Information Service (WoSIS).
> WoSIS-derived datasets can be accessed here:
https://www.isric.org/explore/wosis/accessing-wosis-derived-datasets
> Further information:
https://www.isric.or...
SoilGrids produces maps of soil properties for the entire globe at medium spatial resolution (250 metres cell size) using state-of-the-art machine learning methods to generate the necessary models. It takes as inputs soil observations from about 240 000 locations worldwide and over 400 global environmental covariates describing vegetation, terrain...
>>> See online platform at https://soilgrids.org/ <<<
Soil information is fundamen8tal for many global applications, such as food security, land degradation, water resources, hydrology, climate change and ecological conservation. To address these diverse needs, it is important to provide free, consistent, easily accessible and standardized soil in...
Spatially resolved estimates of change in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks are necessary for supporting national and international policies aimed at achieving land degradation neutrality and climate change mitigation. In this work we report on the development, implementation and application of a data‐driven, statistical method for mapping SOC stock...
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 repository and subsequently s...
'GSP Pillar 4 identified the need to develop/support national level databases, based on common de facto standards, that contain a list of predefined, commonly required, soil properties for geo-referenced soil profiles (site and layers), and this within a federated structure. Originally, two types of soil profile databases (called Tier 1 and Tier 2)...
Soil carbon has been measured for over a century in applications ranging from understanding biogeochemical processes in natural ecosystems to quantifying the productivity and health of managed systems. Consolidating diverse soil carbon datasets is increasingly important to maximize their value, particularly with growing anthropogenic and climate ch...
There is growing international interest in better managing soils to increase soil organic carbon content to contribute to climate change mitigation, to enhance resilience to climate change and to underpin food security, through initiatives such as international “4p1000″ initiative and the FAO's Global assessment of soil organic carbon sequestration...
A summary presenting the challenges for soil carbon sequestration research, hypothesis to be further tested and key research (and innovation) products.
Soil is key in the realisation of a number of UN Sustainable Development Goals providing a variety of goods and services. Erosion, decline in soil organic carbon and loss of biodiversity can lead to soil and land degradation, a global challenge for sustainability. It is therefore important to link the ecosystem services approach with the multitude...
ISRIC has developed a centralized enterprise database known as WoSIS (World Soil Information Service) to safeguard and share soil data upon their standardization and harmonization. Data have been shared by a growing number of partners and data providers, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge. Over 30 datasets from all
around the globe have...
In order to be able to address local, regional and global issues such as sustainable land management, food security, climate change mitigation and soil-related indicators of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development the need for reliable, relevant and accurate soil information and data is increasing. Currently, the soil data community is providing...
The SoilGrids system (www.soilgrids.org) uses machine learning algorithms to predict soil type and basic soil properties at seven depths on global extent. These algorithms (i.e., random forests, gradient boosting) are trained with soil observations assembled from 150 000 locations across the globe as stored in WoSIS (ISRIC’s World Soil Information...
> Many studies have shown that agricultural soils have potential to sequester carbon, when judiciously managed, resulting in various initiatives to sequester organic carbon in agricultural lands. Yet, there is still much uncertainty about this potential. The EU H2020 CIRCASA project aims to address this knowledge gap.
> The CIRCASA project is impl...
Reported potentials for sequestration of carbon in soils of agricultural lands are overly optimistic because they assume that all degraded cropland and grassland can be subjected to best management practices. Two approaches for estimating this potential are presented. Method 1 (M1) considers literature‐derived best estimates for annual SOC gains (M...
Soil is an important provider of ecosystem services, yet it remains one of the least developed data layers in global land models and uncertainties are large. In this context, there is a pressing need for improved, quality-assessed soil information at multiple scale levels. ISRIC-World Soil Information (WDC-Soils) has a mission to serve the internat...
In this paper we present effects of four paired agricultural management practices (organic matter (OM) addition versus no organic matter input, no-tillage (NT) versus conventional tillage, crop rotation versus monoculture, and organic agriculture versus conventional agriculture) on five key soil quality indicators, i.e., soil organic matter (SOM) c...
Characterization of soil water retention, e.g., water content at field capacity (FC) and permanent wilting point (PWP) over a landscape plays a key role in efficient utilization of available scarce water resources in dry land agriculture; however, direct measurement thereof for multiple locations in the field is not always feasible. Therefore, pedo...
To better address the growing demand for soil information ISRIC - World Soil Information has developed
a centralized database for the shared benefit of the international community. This database, hereafter
referred to as WoSIS (World Soil Information Service), has been designed in such a way that, in principle,
any type of soil data (point, polygon...
Quality-assessed and standardised/harmonised soil data are needed to underpin a range of global assessments at different scale levels. Since 2010, ISRIC has been developing an approach and workflow for generating open soil data. The first step is to collate/safeguard soil data (both historic and new) from any region in the world with clear informat...
In this paper we present effects of four paired agricultural management practices (organic matter (OM) addition versus no organic matter input, no-tillage (NT) versus conventional tillage, crop rotation versus monoculture, and organic agriculture versus conventional agriculture) on five key soil quality indicators, i.e., soil organic matter (SOM) c...
Soil is an important provider of ecosystem services, yet it remains one of the least developed data layers in global land models and uncertainties are large. In this context, there is a pressing need for improved, quality-assessed soil information at multiple scale levels. ISRIC - World Soil Information (WDC-Soils) has a mission to serve the intern...
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...
This report gives an overview of main procedures and standards in use at ISRIC – World Soil Information, regular member of the ICSU World Data System. These cover the whole data life cycle from field sampling to serving quality-assessed soil data to the world community. Consistent procedures and de facto standards are used to screen (QA/QC) and sta...
View article on-line at: https://theconversation.com/open-soil-science-technology-is-helping-us-discover-the-mysteries-under-our-feet-81727 (PDF available on request)
This article is based on discussions during the 'International workshop on Open Land Data: Mobile Apps and Geo-services for Open Soil Data' , ISRIC, 2-4 July 2017 ( Wageningen): http...
This pdf accompanies the following abstract:
Heuvelink GBM, Batjes NH, Brus DJ, Gruiter JJD, McBratney AB and Stockmann U 2017. Towards a sampling desing for monitoring global soil organic carbon stocks. In: Wallinga J, G Mol, VL Mulder, AM Zaal and B Jansen (editors), Wageningen Soil Conference, Wageningen, pp 72.
Available at: https://www.wur.nl...
Accurate estimation of the global soil organic carbon (SOC) stock and temporal changes
therein are of vital importance for climate-change studies. Most current assessments take a model-based approach to predict SOC spatially and aggregate point predictions to a global SOC stock estimate. Estimates of SOC stock dynamics are derived by repeating this...
Standardization of world soil profile data to support global mapping and modelling - The WoSIS approach.
PDF of oral presentation.
Distribution of soil data using Internet Technologies (IT) is known to be complicated [1][7].
Many technical, maintenance and legislative requirements have to be addressed. Spatial Data
Infrastructures (SDI) are frameworks or platforms specially prepared to facilitate distribution of
metadata and data in a simple and effective way. With SDIs, it is...
This report accompanies the presentation on the "Benefits of Soil Carbon - An overview", which was one of the introductory lectures to the GSOC2017 mapping course for the Global Soil Partnership (GSP). It describes a hands-on excercise with the Simple Assessment tool of the Carbon Benefits Project (CBP). The CBP tools are hosted at http://cbp-web1....
These zipped data are part of the "Excercise with the Simple Assessment Tool of the CBP system".
For related materials see: http://www.isric.org/documents/document-type/training-material-gsoc-mapping-cbp-tools
Within the framework of regional capacity training in support of the ‘Global Soil Organic Carbon’ (GSOC) Map, FAO/GSP (Global Soil Partnership) and ISRIC – World Soil Information hosted a training session in Wageningen (6 to 23 June 2017). This presentation on the ”Benefits of Soil Carbon” was one of the introductory lectures to the GSOC2017 course...
This paper describes the technical development and accuracy assessment of the most recent and improved version of the SoilGrids system at 250m resolution (June 2016 update). SoilGrids provides global predictions for standard numeric soil properties (organic carbon, bulk density, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), pH, soil texture fractions and coarse...
The aim of the World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) is to serve quality-assessed, georeferenced soil data (point, polygon, and grid) to the international community upon their standardisation and harmonisation. So far, the focus has been on developing procedures for legacy point data with special attention to the selection of soil analytical and p...
This report serves to give an overview of main procedures and standards in use at ISRIC – World Soil Information, regular member of the ICSU World Data System. These cover the whole data life cycle from field sampling to serving quality-assessed soil data to the world community. Consistent procedures and de facto standards are used to screen (QA/QC...
Capability, a term that has been well defined in welfare economics, can be applied to soil by defining the intrinsic capacity of a soil to contribute to ecosystem services, including biomass production. Seven soil functions are used to define capabilities, and combining different functions in storylines provides integrated expressions for capabilit...
The research community increasingly analyses global environmental problems like climate change and desertification with models. These global environmental modelling studies require global, high resolution, spatially exhaustive, and quantitative data describing the soil profile. This study aimed to develop a pedological approach that takes stock of...
http://www.eurosoil2016istanbul.org/files/Eurosoil-2016-Abstract-Book.pdf#page=104
The demand for soil data for agro-ecological and other environmental applications at national, regional and global level is growing; establishing a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for global soil data is key for connecting soil data holders and serving the user co...
Soil bulk density (ρ b) data are needed for a wide range of environmental studies. However, ρ b is rarely reported in soil surveys. An alternative to obtain ρ b for data-scarce regions, such as the Rio Doce basin in southeastern Brazil, is indirect estimation from less costly covari-ates using pedotransfer functions (PTF). This study primarily aims...
Available on-line at: http://www.scidatacon.org/2016/sessions/32/paper/209/
ISRIC - World Soil Information (WDC-Soils) has a mission to serve the international community as custodian of global soil data and information, and to increase awareness and understanding of soils in major global issues. With partners we have implemented a server database b...
The abstract is available online at: http://www.scidatacon.org/2016/sessions/32/paper/209/ (no PDF available).
ISRIC - World Soil Information (WDC-Soils) has a mission to serve the international community as custodian of global soil data and information, and to increase awareness and understanding of soils in major global issues. With partners we...
In 2014, the USAID project ‘Grazing lands, livestock and climate resilient mitigation in Sub-Saharan Africa’ held two workshops, hosted by the Colorado State University, which brought together experts from around the world. Two reports resulted from these workshops, one an assessment of the state of the science, and the other an inventory of relate...
This presentation gives an overview of the objectives and progress made towards the standardization and harmonization of world soil data as undertaken in the context of the collaborative project ”ISRIC World Soil Information Service (WoSIS 2) ”.
To enable the use of new (web) technologies that permit faster and new forms of soil information delivery, ISRIC has developed a centralized and user–focused server database, known as ISRIC World Soil Information Service (WoSIS). This system will serve the international community with validated and authorized data derived from a growing range of 's...
This report is a detailed review, synthesis, and analysis of the current “state of the science” concerning the potential for carbon sequestration in grazing lands through improved land management practices in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It aims to provide an up-to-date assessment of the science of C sequestration from improved land management, includ...
This report is a detailed review, synthesis, and analysis of the current “state of the science” concerning the potential for carbon sequestration in grazing lands through improved land management practices in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It aims to provide an up-to-date assessment of the science of C sequestration from improved land management, includ...
The ongoing debate about improving food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is about how
to enrich its soils. A core challenge within the risk-averse smallholder farming systems
prevailing in SSA is to judiciously combine mineral with bio-organic nutrient applications and
close nutrient cycles to improve soil health, hence crop productivity, with...
There is a growing demand for quality-assessed soil information in support of studies of environmental, societal and economic sustainability. Nonetheless, soil remains one of the least well described data in global land models and uncertainties remain large. To address this gap, with (inter)national partners, ISRIC is developing a range of derived...
The research community increasingly uses models to analyze global environmental problems. On soil degradation, these studies require high resolution, spatially exhaustive, quantitative data on soil properties. This study aimed to develop a methodology that takes stock of available legacy data to create a suitable global soil database to support int...
Supplemental information to: Batjes NH 2016. Harmonized soil property values for broad-scale modelling (WISE30sec) with estimates of global soil carbon stocks. Geoderma 269:61-68 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2016.01.034)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
This...
Aim
The influence of soil properties on photosynthetic traits in higher plants is poorly quantified in comparison with that of climate. We address this situation by quantifying the unique and joint contributions to global leaf‐trait variation from soils and climate.
Location
Terrestrial ecosystems world‐wide.
Methods
Using a trait dataset compris...
The file includes:
A legend sheet with all variables and their description.
A data sheet including trait data (SLA, Nmass, Pmass, Amass, Narea, Parea, Aarea, gs) associated with soil and climate variables which derived (except for annual precipitation and temperature) from worldwide soil and climate datasets
Trait data were collated from sources li...
In March 2013, 40 leading experts from across the world gathered at a workshop, hosted by the European Commission, Directorate General Joint Research Centre, Italy, to discuss the multiple benefits of soil carbon as part of a Rapid Assessment Process (RAP) project commissioned by SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment). This col...
http://www.cabi.org/openresources/45322