On-the-job Training “Digital Soil Organic Carbon Mapping” of the South American Soil Partnership
Within the framework of the Technical Cooperation Project “Development of capacities on soil information for the sustainable management of natural resources in the countries of South America”, the GSP together with FAO’s Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago de Chile, supported by the Instituto de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) from the Ministry of Agroindustry of the Republic of Argentina and the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries of Uruguay organized on-the-job training on “Digital Soil Organic Carbon Mapping” from 28 August to 1 September 2017 in Montevideo, Uruguay.
This activity is part of the development and compilation of a Global Soil Organic Carbon map (GSOCMap) agreed during the 4th Session of the GSP Plenary Assembly held in May 2016 in Rome in order to support the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) process in cooperation with and as requested by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and its Science Policy Interface (SPI). The 25th Committee of Agriculture - COAG (FAO, Rome, 26-30 September 2016) and the 155th FAO Council (5-9 December 2016) further supported the assignment of the GSP with this task.
The objective of the training was to develop the national capacities of the 10 countries Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela to handle soil information and produce a national soil organic carbon map as well as its associated uncertainty. The results of the training were in-country capacities in: i) monitoring the SDG progress in particular indicator 15.3.1 on Land Degradation; and ii) the estimation and reporting on GHG emissions, to be presented to the UNFCCC, as well as the measurement of the effectiveness of the implemented national mitigation measures. The global soil organic carbon map GSOCMap is being developed using a distributed (bottom-up) approach which strongly relies on country inputs to build a global map from national soil organic carbon (SOC) maps produced under common specifications. Focal points of the 10 countries of the region appointed national specialists to participate in the training and commited to the finalization of the respective national maps. Topics of the training included data base harmonization, interpolation and extrapolation of soil data, multivariate statistics, model development and validation for predicting SOC contents using environmental covariates and its associated uncertainty. The working language of the training was Spanish. At the end of the training, a plan was established for each country according to their needs to follow up the finalization of the national SOC maps and the regional SOC map for South America. The national maps will enable the production of the harmonised GSOC map which will be launched on 5 December 2017, World Soil Day.