Resources
Conference presentations
January 21, 2025
Seedling: A User-Friendly, Scalable, and Collaborative Digital Soil Mapping Workflow
Slides of a presentation by Giulio Genova at 3rd Joint Workshop of the IUSS Working Groups Digital Soil Mapping & GlobalSoilMap, Bengaluru, India, January 2025.
Seedling is a simplified R-based Digital Soil Mapping workflow developed at ISRIC - World Soil Information. The workflow starts from standardised inputs, it organises data for modelling, performs modelling with Random Forest and creates soil maps as final outputs, including pixel based uncertainty. The LSC hubs project supported the further development of the tool.
Download the software from or read the documentation at Wageningen University Gitlab.
July 1, 2024
A fun way to do spatial cataloguing and publishing
The software components implemented and improved in the LSC hubs project have been presented at the open source geospatial software conference FOSS4G Europe, Tartu, Estonia, July 2024. The slides are available via the conference website.
This presentation focusses on workflows in data management which enable maintenance of data and metadata by researchers, while sharing this information to a wider audience.
The components are maintained in github
July 1, 2024
SDI maintenance DevOps style
The software components implemented and improved in the LSC hubs project have been presented at the open source geospatial software conference FOSS4G Europe, Tartu, Estonia, July 2024. The slides are available via the conference website.
This presentation focusses on automated deployments of updates of the content and components of the hub.
The components are maintained in github
May 1, 2024
Land, Soil, Crop Information Services for Climate-Resilient Food Systems in Africa
Slides of a presentation by Michael Okoti at the Monitoring soil health and soil health investments at different scales, Africa Fertilizer & Soil Health Summit, Nairobi, Kenya, May 2024.
May 1, 2023
Land, Soil, Crop Information Services for Climate-Resilient Food Systems in Africa
Slides of a presentation by Thaisa van der Woude at the Land, Soil, Crop Information Services for Climate-Resilient Food Systems in Africa conference in 2023 at the ASARECA Agriculture Ministerial Conference, Kampala, Uganda, May 2023.
Research highlights
April 7, 2025
Assessing the Need for Establishing Land, Soil, and Crop Information Hubs to Support Climate-Smart Agriculture in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda
Policy brief: Assessing the need for establishing land, soil, and crop information hubs to support climate-smart agriculture in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda
The brief outlines the methodology, use cases, areas of interest, key findings, and recommendations derived from a comprehensive needs assessment conducted in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda to ensure the relevance and sustainability of the hubs within national agricultural research organisations in these three countries.
[Access resource](https://doi.org/10568/177426]
April 7, 2025
Mapping Soil Fertility Properties in Central Ethiopia at 100m Spatial Resolution
Wageningen University & Research PhD candidate Musefa Redi Abegaz, whose research contributes to the Land Soil Crop Information Services (LSC Hubs) project, has published his first PhD research paper in Geoderma.
This study leverages digital soil mapping to generate high-resolution 3D maps of key soil fertility properties across Central Ethiopia, covering all Shewa, Arsi, and Jimma zones.
May 1, 2023
Root zone soil water capacity for climate-smart fertiliser
Root zone soil water capacity for climate-smart fertiliser. LSC-IS fieldwork research in Ethiopia by PhD candidate Musefa Redis featured in the ISRIC World Soil Day celebration, December 2023.
Video
December 8, 2025
Highlights from LSC-IS closing event
At the end of October 2025, the project ‘Land, Soil and Crop Information Services to support Climate-Smart Agriculture’ held a closing event in Addis Ababa to present key results and lessons learned from its five years of implementation in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda.
The completion of the project marks an important milestone in the region’s efforts to leverage data and innovation for sustainable, climate-smart agriculture and more resilient food systems.
December 6, 2025
Testimonies from LSC-IS partners
Partners of the project ‘Land, Soil and Crop Information Services (LSC-IS) to Support Climate-Smart Agriculture (DeSIRA)’ share insights about the initiative.
“As a country we are pushing forward to increase our productivity at the farmer level. One of the gaps we have is information on sustainable land management. Of course we have challenges in terms of soil fertility management, soil health management at the farmer level and also generally in the agultural sector.”
November 27, 2025
Land, Soil and Crop Information Hub in Kenya
Across East Africa, agriculture faces growing challenges — from changing weather patterns to declining soil health. Strengthening adaptive capacity is essential to ensure long-term resilience and food security.
The Land, Soil, and Crop Information Services (LSC-IS) project is helping meet this need by establishing data hubs within national agricultural research institutions to support climate-smart agriculture.
In Kenya, the LSC-Hub is offering support and knowledge to end users on effective land management practices aimed at increasing productivity.
Throughout the country, project implementers and end users—including extension officers and farmers—are sharing how this information is enhancing their work, informing their decisions, and contributing to a more resilient and productive agricultural system in Kenya.
November 12, 2025
Land, Soil and Crop Information Hub in Ethiopia
Across East Africa, agriculture faces growing challenges — from changing weather patterns to declining soil health. Strengthening adaptive capacity is essential to ensure long-term resilience and food security.
The Land, Soil, and Crop Information Services (LSC-IS) project is helping meet this need by establishing data hubs within national agricultural research institutions to support climate-smart agriculture.
In Ethiopia, the LSC-Hub is already delivering real value to farmers, researchers, and policymakers through practical, data-driven solutions.
Now being integrated with the National Agricultural Data Hub, it is strengthening national efforts to make agricultural data more accessible, usable, and impactful.
Across the country, project implementers and end-users, ranging from researchers to extension officers and farmers, are sharing how this information is enhancing their work, informing decisions, and contributing to a more resilient and productive agricultural system in Ethiopia.
March 20, 2023
LSC-IS project concept
A short introduction to the big ideas behind the Land Soil Crop Information Services (LSC Hubs) project.
In East Africa, climate change leads to a drastic reduction of the quality and resilience of the land, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and food and nutrition insecurity for the growing urban and rural populations. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can mitigate the impacts of climate change while increasing agricultural productivity and farm income.
Land Soil Crop Hubs (LSC Hubs) bring together available data in information hubs at a national level. This project is a collaboration between Wageningen University Center for Development Innovation, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), ISRIC - World Soil Information, Ethiopia Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) , Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), and Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB).
This project is co-funded by the European Union, The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ISRIC - World Soil Information through the Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA).
