Position soils in the Global Agenda and promote sustainable soil management. The Partnership, hosted by FAO, works hard to improve soil governance to guarantee productive soils towards food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and sustainable development for all.

As a follow-up FAO and Unesco decided in 1961 to prepare a Soil Map of the World at 1:5 000 000 scale. The project was completed over a span of twenty years. It was the fruit of world-wide collaboration between innumerable soil scientists and remained until recently the only global overview of soil resources.

The FAO Digital Soil Map of the World is the digitized version of the FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World produced in paper version at scale 1:5 million. It shows 4931 mapping units consisting of soil associations, which are mixtures of different soil types, classified according to the FAO-UNESCO Legend, which defines a total of 106 soil units on ...

The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical properties of soils at approximately 1 km resolution. Its main objective is to serve as a basis for prospective studies on agro-ecological zoning, food security and climate change.

The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is developed by FAO and IIASA as a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical...

the framework of FAO and Unesco programmes. The different stages of the work included comparative studies of soil maps, field and laboratory work, and the organization of international expert meetings and study tours. The secretariat of the joint project, located at FAO Headquarters, was vested with the

The Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) is a 30 arc-second raster database with over 16000 different soil mapping units that combines existing regional and national updates of soil information worldwide (SOTER, ESD, Soil Map of China, WISE) with the information contained within the 1:5 000 000 scale FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World (FAO ...

Current global estimates, derived from the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD; FAO/IIASA/ISRIC/ISS-CAS/JRC, 2009), suggest that approximately 1 417 Pg of SOC are stored in the first meter of soil and about 716 Pg organic C in the top 30 cm (Hiederer and Köchy, 2011).

Each of the nine following volumes contains an explanatory text and soil maps covering one of the main regions of the world. FAO and Unesco wish to express their gratitude to the government institutions, the International Society of Soil Science, and the many individual soil scientists who have contributed to this international project.

The technological advances in remote sensing, computers, terrain analysis, geostatistics, GIS data integration, and instrumentation has made it possible to achieve unprecedented reliability and utility in digital soil maps.