About the GloSIS Discovery Hub

How to search

1. Find — zoom in on the area you are interested in. Once you are past zoom level 5, the Federation results panel on the right shows what the national systems hold in the map view, and it follows the map as you move it. Collapse the panel to pause searching while you look around.
2. Choose — Point data lists one layer per national system: its soil profiles in the view, with every soil property measured. Raster data lists the soil maps. Press Add to put a layer on the map.
3. Explore — the layers you add appear in the On the map panel on the left. Choose the property that colours the points, the depth and statistic of a map, and its opacity; the legends are there too. Click a point to see all its measurements.
4. Tables and downloads — open the attribute table of a point layer to read every profile and depth in rows, sort it and select profiles on the map; dock it at the bottom or move it around, one table per layer. The icons lead to the metadata, the downloads (profiles as CSV, maps as GeoTIFF) and the national system itself.

The address in your browser keeps the map view, so you can share a search by sharing the link.

Where the data comes from

Data stays in each country. The hub keeps a copy of each national catalogue and a summary of the soil properties each system makes available through GloSIS; the maps, profile points and profile downloads themselves are fetched from the national system at the moment you ask for them.

Each national system decides what it publishes and under which licence. Please respect the licence shown in each record and cite the national system as the source of the data.

Keeping results up to date

The hub checks every national system every few minutes. A system that does not answer is taken off the map until it is back, and map layers that no longer work are left out of the results. The Nodes page lists every registered system, including the ones that are down, and shows why.

Joining the hub

National systems ask to join by pressing Connect in their own administration panel. Each request is checked and approved before the system appears here, and a system can disconnect at any time.

Standards

Catalogues are read through OGC API – Records, maps through OGC Web Map Service (WMS), and soil properties, procedures and units use GloSIS codes.

Map credits

Satellite imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community. Street map © OpenStreetMap contributors. Relief: Terrain Light © EOX (CC BY 4.0). Map layers and soil data © each national Soil Information System.

Privacy

Visitors do not need an account and are not tracked. Your preferences (language, theme and map and panel settings) are kept in your own browser only. The background maps come from Esri, EOX and OpenStreetMap and the typeface from Google Fonts, which receive the usual technical details of your browser when they are loaded.