Explore the world beneath our feet with mySoil
Tom Marshall
The British Geological Survey (BGS) just launched mySoil, a new mobile app giving access to detailed maps of the soils around Great Britain. You can use it to find out about the soil where you live and how its properties affect the vegetation and habitats above.
The app provides a map of the soil's so-called parent material - the area's underlying geology - and users can zoom in for more information about soil depth, texture, acidity and organic matter content, as well as vegetation data for the whole UK. It's a collaboration between BGS and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), another NERC research centre.
It's part of a more general drive to share scientific data more widely with the public, seen already in the BGS OpenGeoscience web portal and its iGeology app, which gives smartphone users access to more general geological data about the land around them. The new app integrates BGS soil data with CEH's information on vegetation and ecology, drawn from its Countryside Survey and Land Cover Map 2007 projects.
It's currently available for iPhones and iPads, and free to download from the BGS website; an Android version is planned too, though we're not yet sure when it'll launch.
Posted on 15 June 2012
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