Map:
UNEP Gridded FAO/UNESCO Soil Units
This data-set was produced at UNEP/GRID (Geneva) by rasterizing on a 2-minute grid from a vector GIS (Arc/Info) version of the 1973 FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World at 1:5,000,000 scale, produced by ESRI of Redlands CA. This work was completed in 1984 as part of an FAO/UNEP Desertification and Mapping Project (ESRI, 1984). The Arc/Info version of the FAO Soil Map of the World was used as the base map for this project. The original FAO Soil Map was produced on 18 map sheets with varying projections. The digitized (vector) version was thus broken into regions with different projections. One of these projections did not have an inverse transformation (Miller Oblate Stereographic Projection for Africa), so it has been difficult to assemble a digital version of this data-set onto a uniform (i.e., lat/long) global grid.
Some modifications were made to the original data in the production of this version at UNEP/GRID, including conversion from a 106 category legend to 133 categories. Although the documentation provided with the data refers only to Africa, it is assumed to be relevant to the global data-set. For more information on content of the data-set, see the scanned documentation on the CD-ROM (DOCUMENT/A16X).
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