Operational Digital Soil Mapping: Achievements, Challenges and Future Strategies to Go Beyond

Abstract

In the first two decades of this century, two projects, GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids, concretized Digital Soil Mapping's (DSM) move from research to operational activity. These projects have helped provide users with standardised global soil information. Despite their undeniable success, the current GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids products still have limitations. First, the accuracy of DSM products remains poor—the accuracy challenge. Second, a large number of soil properties are still not addressed by current DSM applications—the relevance challenge. Such limitations greatly hinder the effective use of current DSM products for decision-making, especially when decisions are to be made at the local level. To overcome the above limitations, I argue that the current broad-scale strategies for the operational application of DSM—in the GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids projects—should be complemented by a new strategy that would focus on more local scales and would be more open to local soil knowledge and the needs of local soil users. Applying such a local strategy raises some important questions—which local scale? How to build a participative DSM? Do we need new DSM models? How do we organise the implementation of the new local DSM strategy? These are briefly discussed in this paper.