An Open European Soil Portal

By Lance McKee with Marc Van Liedekerke and Panos Panagos of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, TP 280 I-21020 Ispra (VA) - Italy

The characteristics of the soil beneath our feet are important not just for farmers, gardeners, landscapers and foresters, but also for builders, civil engineers, hydrologists, geographers, archeologists, environmental managers, conservation groups, ecologists, and, of course, soils scientists. The European Soil Portal, implementing the OpenGIS Web Map Server (WMS) Specification, came online recently to serve a wide variety of professional, business and academic users.

One problem that WMS helped solve was that there were previously a number of important soils databases on computers in Europe, but most were not being made available to the public because some of the data is copyrighted. WMS, which provides views of data without providing the data itself, offered the perfect way to make data viewable online while protecting copyright. Visitors to the site can examine the data, and, if they want to buy it, they can order it online for delivery via the internet or on CD-ROM.

Figure 1: SOMIS map showing Topsoil Organic Carbon Content data.

Currently, the SOMIS (Soil database attribute), PESERA (Soil Erosion), OCTOP (Organic Carbon), and MEUSIS (Multiscape European soil Information System) layers can be viewed through any WMS Client. Other databases are scheduled to come online in the future, including databases of soil profiles and groundwater resources.

Using WMS on the European Soil Portal provided a useful test case for the European Commission's INSPIRE program. INSPIRE, the "Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe." is working to develop an improved, internet-based Geographic Information (GI) framework for environmental policy support in Europe. It made sense to develop an online soil portal as part of INSPIRE, partly to show what could be done with the OGC and ISO standards that are being evaluated for use within the INSPIRE context.

The Soil Portal is the contribution of the Soil & Waste Unit (Institute of Environment and Sustainability of the European Commission) to the building of a thematic spatial data infrastructure on soils. This INSPIRE-inspired initiative aims to promote organizational development and cooperation as well as implementation of new technical capabilities. The Portal hosts a virtual library in which researchers and practitioners can collect all the relevant information regarding soils in Europe, and it also gives the European Soil Bureau Network a place to exchange information and promote various Soil Bureau activities. Some of these activities involve harmonizing different spatial databases and various sources of soil information.