Southern Africa Soil Characteristics Grid for Ecosystem Modeling

Seven global soil property surfaces, including soil-carbon density and total nitrogen density, are provided at a 5 x 5 arc-minute resolution. This dataset is a southern African subset of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme - Data and Information Services (IGBP-DIS) global product. Data is stored in ASCII GRID format for use with ARC INFO and other geospatial tools.

Use Cases

• Modeling soil carbon storage and sequestration potential using the soil-carbon density layer.
• Assessing regional soil fertility and nutrient cycling with the total nitrogen density data.
• Estimating plant-available water for agricultural or ecological studies using field capacity, wilting point, and profile available water capacity surfaces.
• Analyzing soil thermal properties for climate models with the thermal capacity data.
• Incorporating soil bulk density for hydrological and geotechnical modeling.

Strengths

• Contains seven distinct, globally consistent soil property surfaces derived from a standardized international program (IGBP-DIS).
• Provides data at a uniform and relatively high spatial resolution of 5 x 5 arc-minutes (approximately 10-km grid).
• Cross-platform presence on U.S. government data portals signals its established use and importance in the scientific community.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided by any source.
• There is a significant conflict regarding the dataset's last update date: one source lists 2026-03-12, while another indicates 1996-12-31, suggesting possible metadata errors or a static historical dataset.

Provenance

Source

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme - Data and Information Services (IGBP-DIS), distributed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Collection Method

Derived gridded surfaces of selected soil characteristics, format and method unspecified in provided sources.

Time Range

null

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:16:06.561631

Geography

Southern Africa (subset of a global dataset).