James Hutton Institute and National Library offer access to Scotland’s one-inch soil maps

“The maps are an excellent educational resource and show the diversity in the Scottish soil resource.

As part of activities planned to mark the International Year of Soils, the James Hutton Institute and the National Library of Scotland have teamed up to offer access to the Institute’s historical one inch to 1 mile (1:63,360) Soil Survey of Scotland maps, which are now freely searchable and downloadable from the National Library’s website.

Dr Allan Lilly, principal soil scientist at the Institute’s Environmental and Biochemical Sciences group, said: “We are grateful for the amount of work the National Library of Scotland staff have put in over the past few months to make these maps more readily available to the public.

“Approximately 95 percent of the cultivated land in Scotland was mapped by the Soil Survey of Scotland at a scale of 1: 63,360 (with some at 1:50,000 scale) and all of the country at a reconnaissance scale of 1:250,000.

“The maps are an excellent educational resource and show the diversity in the Scottish soil resource.”

The colour-coded maps are available as individual sheets using a zoomable map of Scotland or as a seamless layer on a modern satellite or map base from the National Library website.