SOTER
Soil information is needed for many purposes: policy, engineering, urban and rural development as well as agricultural science. Existing datasets are often not used to their full potential because of poor accessibility: traditional soil maps generally do not display the information that is required or it is presented in a format that cannot be used directly for a particular interpretation. This leads to a perceived absence of useful soil and terrain information.The Soil and Terrain database (SOTER) is a program for storing and handling natural resources data. It consists of a spatial and an attribute data component handled, respectively, by Geographic Information System and database management software. SOTER allows for easy retrieval and updating of the information, as well as for generation of different interpretations of the data in combination with other data layers.
SOTER is used at national level, with scales ranging from 1:250 000 to 1:1 million and globally for the update of the Soil Map of the World at scale 1:5 million.
SOTER, or Soils and Terrain Database, developed by the ISRIC World Soil Information Centre in the Netherlands, is a methodology designed to provide a classification system for world soil resources. SOTER databases help to characterise land in terms of its physiographical topography (the 'lie of the land'), and the lithology (or soil parent material). This information is combined with semantic information about soil properties from representative soil profiles within the mapping associations, an example being soil pH.
Once created, SOTER classifications can be used to underpin a wide range of applications, including assessments of impacts of soil degradation on food supply, soil vulnerability to pollution and modelling of soil organic carbon stock and changes at national and regional levels.The SOTER programme is implemented by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations), UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) and ISRIC, coordinated by the International Union of Soil Science.
For further information about SOTER, contact:
ISRIC - World Soil Information
PO Box 353
6700 AJ Wageningen
The Netherlands
Phone +31 (0)317 471711
Fax +31 (0)317 471700
E-mail soil.isric@wur.nl
Internet http://www.isric.org