Presentation that took place on 18 November 2014 at the World Soil Museum, in Wageningen, the Netherlands. The aim was to report the activities developed at ISRIC during the year of 2014.

1. ISRIC's Fruitful Meeting
18-Nov-2014
Alessandro Samuel Rosa
Guest Researcher
Report of activities
Jan-Dec 2014

2. Science without Borders
● Coordination for the Improvement of
Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
● Supervisors
– Dr. Lúcia Anjos – Universidade Federal
Rural do Rio de Janeiro
– Dr. Gustavo Vasques – Embrapa Solos
– Dr. Gerard Heuvelink – ISRIC

3. Was this year fruitful?

4. The original plan
● PhD research project
● GSIF project
– WOSIS and World Soil
Profiles
– GSIF R-package
– documentation
● Universal Soil
Classification System
– Tropical Soils

5. The original plan
● Evaluate the main sources of uncertainty in DSM
– CHAPTER I. How much uncertainty reduction is achieved
when more detailed environmental covariates are used?
– CHAPTER II. How do calibration sample size and
sampling design affect model composition and prediction
accuracy?
– CHAPTER III. How strongly correlated are environmental
covariates? Is prediction accuracy improved when they
are transformed to their principal components?
– CHAPTER IV

6. I was not prepared for...
● Changing some aspects of the project
● Programming and packaging
● Discussing about authorship
● Waiting for the feedback of the co-authors
● Working with three active co-authors
● Summer break

7. Contributions
● SoilGrids1km: quality checks, cross-validation,
publicity (Brazil)
● WOSIS: quality checks, duplicates
● SoilInfo App, Spring School: publicity (Brazil)
● Universal Soil Classification: Erika Michéli,
Hungary, Brazilian soil data
● WRB: Peter Schad, new qualifier (iron),
Brazilian soil data at ISRIC

8. Events and publications
● WCSS: new qualifier for the WRB (iron)
● WCSS: formalizing free survey (psycology)
● EGU: quality of freely available covariates
● geoENV: formalizing free survey (statistics)
● PlosOne: SoilGrids1km

9. Events and publications
● The Santa Maria dataset, reviewed by Ad
– Metadata
● R-package pedometrics
– Plotting
– Stewise regression
– Spatial simulated annealing
● Geoderma: paper under review

10. Do more detailed environmental covariates deliver
more accurate soil maps?
● Environmental covariates
● Some results for soil organic carbon
● Main conclusions

12. l
l
l
l l
SOC model ranking
Adjusted R2 Design
land
geo
dem
soil
0.56
0.54
0.52
0.50
0.48
0.46
0.44
l
l l l
l l
l
l l l l l l
l
l l
l
l
l l l
l l
l
l
30 25 20 15 10 5 1
l l
sat

13. Do more detailed environmental covariates deliver
more accurate soil maps?
● Modest increase in the accuracy of linear models
● Benefit depends on soil property and other
covariates
● Decision based on:
– Relation between covariate and soil property
– How much more detailed?
– Budget + Knowledge
● More soil observations?

14. Meetings, Talks, Discussions
● The great ISRIC family (Gerard, Tom, Thomas,
Bas, Jorge, Eloi, Maria, Marcos, Luc, Ad, Niels)
● Dick Brus and Jaap de Gruijter, Wageningen
● Nicolas Saby and Dominique Arrouays, France
● Hannes Reuter, Luca Montanarella, Erika Michéli,
Vince Láng, Tom Vanwalleghem
● Murray Lark and Richard Webster, England
● ...

15. Was this year fruitful?
● From my perspective:
– Yes, this year was very fruitful!
● From ISRIC's perspective:
– PhD student as a guest researcher
– Not many short term concrete benefits
– Long term project, future collaboration

16. My future
● 2015 – Embrapa Solos
– September: Pedometrics (Spain) + ISRIC
● PhD defence – February 2016
● ???

17. ISRIC's future (my suggestions)
● Popularization: Spring School, Ambassadors
● WOSIS + WorldSoilProfiles
– Harmonization, Regional experts, Offline, SoilInfo App
● GlobalSoilMap & GSP
– ISRIC is the world soil data centre!!!
● Universal Soil Classification (harmonization)
● Soil (micro)biology
● A kitchen

18. Many thanks for
everything!