European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM)

The European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EUDASM) is a joint initiative of the Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IES) in the European Commission (Italy) and ISRIC – World Soil Information. It was set up to preserve older data (in map and paper form) as they are building blocks of most current soil information. in many developing and transitional countries, soil maps are being lost because of lack of proper attention to storage and retrieval, often compounded by a loss of institutions that have been responsible for the acquisition and maintenance of soil and land resources data. EuDASM provides access to an on-line collection of  high-resolution scanned soil and related land resource maps for Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States of America, originally in paper format.More than 6,000 maps from 135 countries have been captured and are freely available to users through a user-friendly web-based interface.