DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16086698
title: Scottish Soils Knowledge and Information Base (SSKIB250k 2025)

description: SSKIB (Scottish Soils Knowledge and Information Base) is a summary dataset comprising mean, median, maximum, minimum and standard deviations of a range of soil chemical and physical attributes for a typical (modal) soil profile for all soil series delineated on the 1:250,000 Scottish National Soil Map.The dataset was developed over a number of years (from around 2004) for internal use and was released to the public to accompany the 1:250 000 scale National Soil Map of Scotland on 1st April 2011. It is based on soil analytical data from soil profiles collected since 1934, with the bulk of the data collected from the late 1960s to late 1980s.

Development of SSKIB began as a Scottish Government (RESAS) funded research programme around 2004 primarily for internal use with the then Macaulay Land Use Research Institute for broad scale modelling of changes in soil chemistry. Its use was extended to assess potential changes in soil carbon contents (ECOSSE model) and finally developed to deliver soils information via the web (https://soilfinder.hutton.ac.uk/) over PC, Android and IOS operating systems. It was released for general use in 2011 to provide soil chemical data to accompany the 1:250 000 scale soil map and underwent a few minor revisions in 2018 and in 2022 where some redundant data columns were removed where data was of poor quality or unpublished and unverified (primarily internal use at the Hutton). In 2025 some of the carbon values of (mainly) organic horizons which were found to be unrealistically low were reviewed and removed from the dataset. The removal of indivudual soil horizons with low carbon concentrations that comprised the summary data meant the summary data of some other soil properties were changed in this 2025 version. In addition, other soil properties that were derivatives of measured data or were inconsitently measured over the whole dataset were removed. Funding to maintain the dataset comes from the Rural & Environment Science & Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government Underpinning National Capacity fund.

The dataset should be cited as 'Soil Survey of Scotland Staff. 2025. Scottish Soils Knowledge and Information Base (SSKIB250K 2025). 10.5281/zenodo.16086698'
description: The newer version of the dataset (SSBIK250k_2025) is also available to download bundled with the National Soil Map of Scotland (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4646891). It is released under the James Hutton Open Data licence. Changes to this version of the dataset includes changes in the carbon values for some organic horizons which were below realistic value for these types of horizons (with knock on consequencies for other calculated soil properties). The derived properties of hydrogen ion equivlents and sum of exchangeable cations have been removed and so were the data on Acetic acid extractable P concentrations as these P data were not consistently measured over the whole dataset. The online dataset at https://soils.environment.gov.scot/maps/soil-maps/national-soil-map-of-scotland/ includes these changes plus reducing the number of abbreviations used to describe soil properties.