ISIS - Irish Soil Information System

Farming activities have long been heralded as being a critical developer and shaper of the rural landscape and environment which exist in Ireland today. Historically, farmers have engaged in resource protection solely out of necessity to sustain their production capacity through generations. However, what has changed in recent times is the way in which environmental protection must be implemented at farm level: we have now entered a new era of legislation driven by environmental protection and legislation at a global and European scale.

Critical to the successful development of such strategies is the knowledge on the location of our soils, and their associated properties. To date, Ireland has only had a national soil map at a scale of 1:575,000, with only half the country mapped in more significant detail. The ISIS project, or Irish Soil Information System, has culminated in a new national soil map at a scale of 1:250,000, as well as a series of tools to access and interact with the data.

Over 450 soil types (or ‘series’) have been identified in Ireland, each of them different in properties, with different environmental and agronomic responses. For each, the properties have been recorded in a database that can now be used to satisfy the policy requirements noted, but importantly the database can also be used to provide the public with the means to enquire and learn about the precious soil resources of Ireland. On these pages are a series of tools and descriptive information seeking to help with this.