The National Soil Resources Institute (NSRI) at Cranfield University incorporates the former Soil Survey and Land Research Centre and, as a result, maintains all the published and unpublished paper soil reports and maps for England and Wales. NSRI market and lease a wide body of digital soil information, comprising the following principal data sets:

• Vector and gridded vector versions of the 1:250,000 scale National Soil Map (NATMAP) including the simplified Soilscapes version;
• The National Soil Inventory of data on soils and topsoil chemistry;
• Representative values or a range of properties and derived functional values for soil series;
• Soil profile descriptions, a proportion of which have accompanying analytical data.

All these data sets are held in the LandIS relational database that is maintained by NSRI staff. More details of each are given here - select from the menus in the left panel.

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Arrangements for access to soil data are governed by an agreement between NSRI and Defra acting on behalf of the Crown. Under the LandIS Agreement:

• Data are only ever licensed (i.e. not sold) for use over a specified period;
• Departments of the Crown and their contractors are entitled to royalty-free data for specified applications, and therefore only pay an administrative fee to cover the cost of extraction and administration;
• Bona fide researchers are entitled to data on a similar basis;
• NSRI is entitled to charge all other individuals and groups, including the Executive Agencies, an additional royalty fee to reflect the value of the information. Royalty fees are calculated using a set of standardised charging formulae that apply progressive discounts on base rates for larger volumes of data.

Data are normally supplied on CD in an agreed format. To find out which datasets we lease, look at our data families description, or alternatively run our handy data quotation advisor utility.

Our standard data licence Terms and Conditions are available for inspection.

For further information regarding leasing digital datasets from LandIS, for a soils data quotation, or for further information, please contact us as below:

Data enquiries
Timothy Farewell
LandIS Information Services Manager
National Soil Resources Institute (NSRI)
Cranfield University
Building 53
Cranfield campus
Cranfield
MK43 0AL
Tel: (01234) 75 29 78
Fax: 01234 752970
nsridata@cranfield.ac.uk
Personal web page
NSRI Institute homepage

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