EJP SOIL project, WP6 - Questionnaire for supporting harmonised soil information and reporting

This stocktaking activity aims at collecting metadata information on the georeferenced soil data available in the EJP-SOIL countries. This stocktaking concerns not just the soil data itself, but also auxiliary information needed for the soil mapping activity, and the mapping experience hold in our institutions. Available doesn’t mean that this information is freely available, but just that it exists, with a specific data owner (which can also be different from your institution) and a specific sharing policy. 

The first sheet, named “description of data sources”, is to insert the list of your data sources. We have put some Italian examples to help you understanding the kind of information to be inserted in this sheet (you can delete them). Basically, it is a list of data sources available, either for basic soil data (point data or mapped data), and for auxiliary data. Among auxiliary data we are also looking for mapped data on soil management. Once the first sheet is compiled, the listed data sources will constitute a drop-down list to be used in the compilation of the following sheets. 

The second sheet, named “soil property_data (SP)”, is for the compilation of the soil property data available in your basic soil data sources. It is most probable that more the one data source exists in your country, storing soil data properties. Each one of these soil data sources should have been described in the first sheet. Then, the soil properties store in each soil data source should be inserted in the second sheet. For each soil property it is requested to indicate the unit of measure used and the analytical method(s) used (can be more then one). In order to help you in the compilation, we have listed, in the third "methods" sheet, the most commonly used analytical methods, but you can add more methods if you adopt different ones. If the data source list is a soil map already published, we are asking you to compile the method used for mapping. 

In the fourth sheet, named “soil management (MG)”, you can list the kind of soil management practices which are available in you data sources. We must stress here, that the data sources for soil management that we are looking for, are georeferenced data sources.

The last 2 sheets are the drop-down lists used in the questionnaire and a description of the terms used.