Programmatic interface to the Harmonized World Soil Database 'HWSD' web services (https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1247). Allows for easy downloads of 'HWSD' soil data directly to your R workspace or your computer. Routines for both single pixel data downloads and gridded data are provided.

To install the current stable release use a CRAN repository:

install.packages("hwsdr")
library("hwsdr")

To install the development releases of the package run the following commands:

if(!require(devtools)){install.packages("devtools")}
devtools::install_github("bluegreen-labs/hwsdr")
library("hwsdr")

Vignettes are not rendered by default, if you want to include additional documentation please use:

if(!require(devtools)){install.packages("devtools")}
devtools::install_github("bluegreen-labs/hwsdr", build_vignettes = TRUE)
library("hwsdr")

Get world soil values for a single site using the following format, specifying coordinates as a pair of latitude, longitude coordinates. Here all available soil layers are queried.

  all <- ws_subset(
    site = "HWSD",
    location = c(34, -81),
    param = "ALL"
  )

You can download gridded data by specifying a bounding box c(lat, lon, lat, lon) defined by a bottom left and top right coordinates. Here the call only extracts the top soil fraction of sand (% weight).

  t_sand <- ws_subset(
    site = "HWSD",
    location = c(32, -81, 34, -80),
    param = "T_SAND",
    path = tempdir(),
    internal = TRUE
  )

By default all parameters are downloaded, a complete list of the individual parameters is provided on the ORNL webpage (https://daac.ornl.gov/SOILS/guides/HWSD.html). Alternatively you may find a similar list of data in the hwsd_meta_data dataset as provided by the package.

Wieder, W.R., J. Boehnert, G.B. Bonan, and M. Langseth. 2014. Regridded Harmonized World Soil Database v1.2. Data set. Available on-line from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. (https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1247).

This project was supported by the Schmidt Futures Initiative Land Ecosystem Models based On New Theory, obseRvations, and ExperimEnts (LEMONTREE) project.