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5 Current Soil Information Systems
Pages 35-46

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From page 35...
... , Luca Montanarella from the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Rik van den Bosch from the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) , and S­ amantha Weintraub from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
From page 36...
... Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service USDA's NRCS has several soil-related datasets, Kinney said, made possible by the ­National Cooperative Soil Survey effort. Several databases in the National Soil Information System (NASIS)
From page 37...
... It is a very robust and complex data base, encompassing almost every aspect of day-to-day operations, including the planning that NRCS does within the NASIS database schema all the way to the data delivery mechanisms. The two predominant delivery mechanisms are the Web Soil Survey and a web service called Soil Data Access, where users can input queries to the Soil SSURGO database itself.
From page 38...
... . This group includes soil scientists who gather data, lab analysts who make measurements, and regional staff who conduct reviews at various points in the process.
From page 39...
... It is an ambitious project, she said, but a prototype is expected to be finished within a few months. Luca Montanarella European Commission Joint Research Centre Beginning in the early 1990s, Montanarella said, the European Commission, which is the executive body of the European Union, began to compile the soil data systems of the EU's various member states into a single system with a harmonized database.
From page 40...
... Thus, the EU Soil Observatory will provide a much more structured and strengthened moni toring of soils than is possible with the current European Soil Information System, with the resulting data and information freely available through the European Soil Data Center.
From page 41...
... To help in that area, ISRIC is working with national soil information institutes to produce soil information systems for their own territories that use their own datasets and take advantage of their own knowledge of their area's soils and their own clients and users. In closing, van den Bosch said that FAO is working with the Global Soil Partnership to create the Global Soil Information System (GLOSIS)
From page 42...
... The data are subject to initial quality control when first entered into the system, she said, followed by a great deal of processing, including quality assurance and algorithm calibration. "Some of the sensor data products actually need quite a bit of calculation and higher-level data algorithms to go from voltage from a sensor to unit of soil moisture, say, or temperature." FIGURE 5-3  NEON field sites map.
From page 43...
... Modelers are excited about using NEON's standardized datasets, and some educators have taken advantage of the t­utorials, lesson plans, and modules that NEON provides for teaching students how to use big, open ecological data, including soil data. Finally, NEON also has partnerships with several ­national labs.
From page 44...
... For this reason, the Joint Research Centre centralizes its sampling strategy and uses teams that are completely trained and managed by the center rather than teams from different countries. "Otherwise," he said, "we would end up every time with a patchwork of different parameters, giving different responses according to national boundaries." Tomislav Hengl commented that LUCAS seems very advanced as a monitoring project and asked about its annual costs.
From page 45...
... Via Slack, participants discussed the challenges faced by new entrants into the information space who want to use the data products but are unfamiliar with the systems. Kathe Todd-Brown responded that these challenges can be overcome by locating the data, understanding the methods associated with them, and then determining their interoperability for different use cases.


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