A Soil Data Platform to Inform Soil Health Investment

Healthy soil is critical to the growth of nutritious food and to farmers’ livelihoods. However, one-third of global soil is already affected by moderate to severe degradation by diverse processes. The reduction of soil degradation is one of the most important policy objectives, but policymakers and local planners require guidance in choosing  the most effective interventions, both scientifically and economically, to reduce soil degradation.   The complex interconnections between agriculture, the natural environment, and social well-being increase the need of researchers to access and use comprehensive soil data sets. Our ability to manage and support soil depends on the data we collect and the information and knowledge that we generate from them. Nevertheless, soil data accessibility and sharing are currently low and represent one of the major barriers to making better decisions in agriculture. A critical first step to capitalize on the opportunities offered by agriculture science and technologies is thus the standardization, organization, and the making of the multitude of specialty datasets generated by studies and projects publicly available to the global community.  To address this challenge, Varda is creating an interactive soil digital platform that allows surfacing and comparing existing soil data across the globe in order to facilitate soil data sharing and interoperability. Moreover, the platform highlights soil data gaps across regions through a soil data gap index, and particularly soil health data gap through another ad hoc index developed by Varda and Aberdeen University. Such indexes will allow multilateral organizations, governments, and agribusiness stakeholders to fill some of these data gaps through ad-hoc soil sampling and data collection campaigns.