mySoil App
What is mySoil?
mySoil is a new free smartphone app from the BGS and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
mySoil lets you take a soil properties map of Britain with you wherever you go, helping you learn about the soil beneath your feet.
And with your phone's GPS you'll know exactly where you are.
Link: Download the mySoil App from iTunes
Download mySoil, for iPhone or iPad, from the App Store
Who can use mySoil?
mySoil is for anyone with an interest in the soil of Britain; including gardeners and vegetable growers, allotment owners, farmers and agricultural specialists, school and college students environmentalists and land-use planners.
View a map of the soil parent material — the underlying geological material — in your local area, retrieve descriptions about the soil depth, texture, pH and organic matter content, and explore vegetation habitat data across Britain.
mySoil improves access to BGS digital data. More about BGS digital data access and licensing.
How does it work?
- Enter a place name or postcode, or locate yourself with your phone's in-built GPS
- Zoom in on your area of interest
- Tap on the soil properties map
- What is the soil like where you are standing? What is its texture, pH, depth, organic matter content?
- Help us to improve our soil map and build up a community produced collection of soil information by sending us photos and details about your soil
- Need more information? Try the NERC Soil Portal
Citizen science
mySoil also enables the general public to upload information about the soil where they live, helping to improve our knowledge about the properties of soils and the vegetation habitats that they provide.
Please help us to improve our soil map and build up a community produced collection of soil information by sending us photos and details about the soil where you live by using mySoil.
Terms and conditions
By uploading and depositing photos or materials, you, as depositor, do so on the understanding they may be used/re-used by others.
By depositing photos and materials you take full responsibility:
- to ensure that they are owned by you (or you have permission to do so); and
- understand that liability regarding their use/re-use may lie with you as depositor.
If there are doubts about ownership, check first before making a deposit on BGS citizen science sites.
BGS Citizen Science operates under the code of a: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Link: Creative Commons License
Free our data!
In December 2009 the BGS launched its OpenGeoscience web portal offering free access to BGS maps, photos, reports, data downloads and software — for non-commercial users.
The BGS iGeology smartphone app brought street-level scale geology into the homes of England, Scotland and Wales. Schools and universities loved it and geologists around the world blogged about it, and they still do.
We hope that the release of mySoil will build on this engagement and help us develop new and innovative ways to use our information to help support sustainable land management.
With mySoil, we are also harnessing the power of the public to ‘crowdsource’ information and extend our knowledge of the soils of Britain.
Soil data layers
mySoil contains information from the BGS soil parent material model, the Countryside Survey and the Land Cover Map 2007.
Information based upon Countryside Survey © Database Right/Copyright NERC (CEH). Land Cover Map 2007 © NERC (CEH) 2011, soils data for England & Wales © National Soil Resources Institute (Cranfield University) (NSRI) and for the Controller of HMSO, 2011, soils data for Scotland SSKIB derived pH for "semi-natural" soils for upper horizon for dominant soil © The James Hutton Institute 2010.
Contact
Contact enquiries for further information about mySoil
- Technology: Crowd-sourced soil data for Europe, Nature, 18 April 2013
