Soils: Environment, Health and Society

23 ◦◦ The National Soils Inventory (1978-88) dataset which contains over 100 attributes from over 700 sites across Scotland ◦◦ The 1:250,000 scale Land Capability for Agriculture (LCA) and Forestry maps • Information is available on the properties of Scottish soils, the roles that they play in our landscape, their contribution to society and the pressures that they face • Summary data on the chemical, physical and biological state of Scotland’s soils can be accessed • Additional datasets have since been added, notably the 1:25,000 scale soil data and the 1:50,000 scale LCA data • The data are INSPIRE compliant and have extensive metadata and descriptions attached to them • There have been around 1000 data downloads from the full suite of stakeholder types • Although most visitors to the site are UK based, there have been visitors from around the world, notably the USA and Australia. Conclusion Scotland’s Soils website, a daughter website of Sotland’s Environment website (SE Web), has been popular since its launch and visitor numbers have been maintained (Fig. 1). Clearly, there is a demand for soil data and it is envisaged that this will continue into the future. It is difficult to gauge the impact that increased and easy availability of data has had on the perception and awareness of the importance of soils to society; the data pages have been the most frequently visited but it is hoped that the pages on Scottish soils and the extensive library have also had positive impacts. There are plans to refresh the site during 2016, including the upload of new datasets and updating the pages with contextual information. Authors: Willie Towers, Allan Lilly, David Donnelly (James Hutton Institute) and Xingyu Xiao (Ricardo AEA) Contact: Allan Lilly (allan.lilly@hutton.ac.uk ) Fig. 1: Summary of number of users and pages viewed each month