Soil data rescue operations in support of national and global soil information: lessons from the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) for data sharing in Ethiopia

Soil and agronomy data has been collected in Ethiopia for over 60 years to understand soil nutrient status. Unfortunately, this data is difficult to access due to its scattered nature, lack of harmonization, and individual ownership, which makes it vulnerable to permanent loss. This has resulted in duplication of efforts and wastage of resources to generate obscured data. Given the emerging computational capacities to make more robust decisions, a large volume of data is required, which is costly and time-consuming to generate. Cognizant of these, the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) for data sharing and access was created in 2018 with joint support and coordination of the Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT, and GIZ. The CoW mobilized its members to map soil and agronomy legacy data, and embarked on data rescue operations. Accordingly, about 20,000 legacy soil profiles which were with various levels of completeness in terms of soil morphological, physical, and chemical properties were rescued. After cleaning and harmonization, the data were put into a central data repository, which is now accessible to the members and the wider data user community, according to the guidelines adopted by the CoW. We present the approaches and achievements including the way forward to achieve Ethiopia’s harmonized soil profile database and the National Soil Information System that meets modern soil data demands and supports the development of national and global 3D soil property and nutrient maps.