What is it about?
Soils store carbon, cycle nutrients, and underpin food production globally. Tracking how they change over time, at any useful scale, has been harder than it sounds. HUMERIS maps organic carbon, nitrogen, pH, and salinity annually from 1985 to 2023, at 1 km resolution across all ice-free land surfaces. We built it from over 600,000 soil measurements pulled from international databases, combined with satellite imagery and climate data processed on Google Earth Engine. Globally, organic carbon and nitrogen have increased slowly, salinity has slightly declined, and pH has barely moved. Cold biomes like boreal forest and tundra show the strongest gains, probably driven by warming. Areas converted to cropland show much weaker trends: converting natural land to agriculture appears to slow, and in some cases cancel, the soil carbon accumulation seen elsewhere.
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Why is it important?
Soil degradation is one of the most pressing but under-monitored environmental challenges of our time. Until now, no global dataset existed that tracked multiple soil properties continuously over decades. HUMERIS fills this gap by providing scientists, policymakers, and land managers with a consistent historical record they can use to identify where soil health is improving or declining, model future trajectories under climate change scenarios, and design more targeted land management strategies. The dataset is open-access and designed to be updated as new satellite data and soil observations become available, making it a living resource for global soil monitoring.
Perspectives
Combining soil measurements with satellite data and machine learning is not a new idea, but doing it consistently across 40 years and the entire globe is. HUMERIS is built around soil, but the pipeline is general — other Earth system variables that are hard to sample directly could be approached the same way. Next steps include extending predictions to deeper soil horizons, running scenarios under different climate trajectories, and refining resolution for regional applications. Some of this work is already underway.
Matteo Dalle Vaglie
Universita degli Studi di Firenze
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A large-scale framework for estimating soil carbon, nitrogen, pH, and salinity dynamics for 1985–2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2534913123.
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