11th INSII Meeting

After four years of online working sessions, nationally mandated institutions and GSP partners now finally met again in-person for the 11^th INSII meeting. The meeting was held from 18-20^th November in Rome with the possibility to participate online. During the meeting Prof. Ganlin Zhang (Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences) was elected as the new INSII Chair by INSII members. Further, a new Steering Committee is currently being appointed, with Fenny van Egmond (Wageningen Environmental Research and ISRIC) as European representative. The new Chair and Steering Committee, will lead the INSII Working Group for the next three following years. 

The Terms of Reference (ToR) as well as the INSII Work Plan have been reviewed and endorsed during the meeting.

Activities of the SoilFER Soil Information and Data (SID) capacity development programme were presented and interested members were invited to take part in the SID under SoilFER, that aims at functioning as a learning program for soil data management, digital soil mapping, soil spectroscopy and chemometric modeling. The program, taking place from September 2025 to June 2026, will make training resources available to the wider community through online and in-person trainings. An open call will be launched to invite selected INSII members from the African, North African and Near East and Latin America regions, to participate in regional workshops on digital soil mapping. 

Further, updates on the Global Soil Nutrient and Nutrient Budgets Map (GSNmap) and the Global Soil Erosion Maps (GSERmap) were presented: The first phase of the GSNmap focused on the development of national soil nutrient maps and associated soil property maps, while the second phase will focus on generating national soil nutrient budget maps. The Working Group is now discussing the methodology and potential collaborations for the establishment of the map. Within the GSERmap initiative, the International Network on Soil Erosion (INSER) has been launched in September, following the recommendation of the ITPS and the endorsement by the 13^th GSP Plenary Assembly. The INSER Working Group on Measuring, Modelling and Mapping will be merged with the previous GSERmap working group.

For the Global Soil Information System (GloSIS), the GloSIS Working Group has been established in response to a request during the last INSII meeting and the 13^th GSP Plenary Assembly. New national soil information systems are to be integrated with GloSIS during 2025 and new thematic map layers have recently been published in the GloSIS Discovery Hub and Map Services, that capabilities are being advanced through the development of a new Application Programming Interface (API). 

Find more information on the INSII Webpage of the Global Soil Partnership.