Senegal FAO Soil Types: Rasterized from UNESCO/FAO World Map (1977)

A geospatial raster dataset mapping soil types across Senegal, derived from the UNESCO/FAO Soil Map of the World (1977). The dataset contains 16 soil classes plus water, rasterized with a cell size of 30 seconds and two minutes latitude/longitude. It was prepared by UNEP/GRID-Geneva for the CISFAM database and published in December 1988.

Use Cases

• Modeling agricultural potential based on FAO soil classifications.
• Regional environmental analysis using the 16 distinct soil classes.
• Historical land resource assessment based on the 1977 source map.
• Integrating soil data with related elevation or climate datasets for famine management studies.

Strengths

• Derived from the authoritative UNESCO/FAO Soil Map of the World.
• Contains 16 distinct soil classes plus a water class.
• Rasterized at a defined spatial resolution (30 seconds and two minutes).

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset was extracted from a continental-scale source, which may limit its applicability at a national scale.

Provenance

Source

UNESCO/FAO Soil Map of the World, processed by UNEP/GRID-Geneva, ESRI, and FAO.

Collection Method

Digitized and rasterized from the 1:5,000,000 scale paper map.

Time Range

Source map from 1977, dataset published December 1988.

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Senegal.