The building of a pan-African soil information system for soil health monitoring

The Soils4Africa project, funded by the European Union under the Horizon2020 Programme, was designed to build an open-access Soil Information System (SIS) for Africa to monitor soil quality across agricultural lands in Africa.

The idea is to create a baseline dataset and a set of standard methodologies and protocols that would allow for repeated soil quality monitoring. A key aspect of this initiative is the field campaign, which IITA–CGIAR coordinated under the leadership of Dr Jeroen Huising and Dr Samuel Mesele.

This continent-wide field campaign involves the development of protocols, electronic data recording forms, and standard operating procedures for data collection and sample processing from 20,000 sampling sites across the continent. Also included is the development of the human capacity to utilize all the tools developed so that future field campaigns can be conducted autonomously or with little external support.

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