Harmonized World Soil Dataset - Major Soil Groups

Soil information, from the global to the local scale, has often been the one missing biophysical information layer, the absence of which has added to the uncertainties of predicting potentials and constraints for food and fiber production. The lack of reliable and harmonized soil data has considerably hampered land degradation assessments, environmental impact studies and adapted sustainable land management interventions.

Recognizing the urgent need for improved soil information worldwide, particularly in the context of the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol for soil carbon measurements and the immediate requirement for the FAO/IIASA Global Agro-ecological Assessment study (GAEZ 2008), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) took the initiative of combining the recently collected vast volumes of regional and national updates of soil information with the information already contained within the 1:5,000,000 scale FAO-UNESCO Digital Soil Map of the World, into a new comprehensive Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD).