Annual-Report-2019

Dr Dominique Arrouays
CONSORTIUM COORDINATOR
SMART LOIRE VALLEY Programme
Dr Dominique Arrouays is a senior research Engineer at the InfoSol Unit, INRAE, Orléans. He has been the head of
the unit from 2000 to 2011. He has been member of the IPCC who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. He has 159
publications in the Web of Science (WoS) and a h-index of 43. He is member of the editorial board of several international
scientific journals. He got the gold medal of the French Academy of Agriculture (2014) and was awarded several “best
papers” in scientific journals. He is Chairman of the “GlobalSoilMap” Working Group (WG) of the International Union of
Soil Sciences (IUSS), which is working on the “bottom-up” approach for generating fine grids of soil properties.
GLADSOILMAP (GLOBAL DIGITAL SOIL MAP)
Soils have critical relevance to global issues, such as food and water security,
climate regulation, sustainable energy, desertification and biodiversity
protection. All these examples require accurate national soil property
information and there is a need to scientific support to develop reliable
baseline soil information and pathways for measuring and monitoring soils.
Soil sustainable management is a global issue, but effective actions require
high-resolution data about soil properties.
Earth, Ecology & Environment Sciences 2019
76
Two projects, GlobalSoilMap and SoilGrids, aim at delivering the first generation
of high-resolution soil property grids for the globe, the first one by a bottomup
approach (from country to globe), the latter by top-down (global). The
GLobAl Digital SOIL MAP (GLADSOILMAP) consortium brings together world
scientific leaders involved in both projects. The consortium aims at developing
and transferring methods to improve the prediction accuracy of soil properties
and their associated uncertainty, by using legacy soil data and ancillary spatial
information. This approach brings together new technologies and methods,
existing soil databases and expert knowledge.
The consortium aims at transferring methods to achieve convergence between top-down and bottom-up approaches,
and to generate methods for delivering maps of soil properties. These maps are essential for communities from climate
and environmental modeling to decision-making and sustainable resources management at a scale that is relevant
to soil management. The consortium will ensure links with the numerous actors in geosciences of the world, and will
contribute to improving their skills in digital mapping and their national and international legibility. The consortium
involves very experienced soil scientists and younger ones well aware of up to date technologies and methods in DSM. It
covers the entire world, which is a guarantee that the results will be largely disseminated and used.
Achievements to date include the first kick-off meeting held in Orléans in November 2019, and a related detailed plan
of actions. The website is operational and the first report has been delivered. Three members of the consortium are
presently co-editing a special issue of a scientific journal. Many papers have already been submitted to this special
issue.