Digital Soils: Databases
Soil data has been collected at the James Hutton Institute (and its predecessors the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and Macaulay Institute for Soil Research) since the 1930s. In that time, over 15,000 sites across Scotland have been visited, sampled and catalogued by Soil Survey of Scotland staff. Information on properties from over 50,000 unique samples is stored in a relational database, and is the basis from which many of the other activities within the Digital Soils group are carried out. Among the data in the database are records from the first and second National Soil Inventories of Scotland (NSIS 1978-88 and NSIS 2007-9), which provide an objective assessment of the national soil resource in the late 1970s/1980s, and the late 2000s. Data from the database is available to download or on request, and as many of the original samples have been preserved in the National Soils Archive, applications can be made to access these samples for research on condition that sufficient material is available and that any data are returned for inclusion in the database.
