A new hub has been created to collate information on the UK's soils as part of a new 'big data' project launched last week.

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The UK Soil Observatory (UKSO) will bring together knowledge and information on UK soils, collecting together data that was previously scattered across a range of institutions to inform researchers, public and private decision makers and interest groups. The Observatory, which was launched on Thursday (10 April), will operate as a not-for-profit entity and provide data for free where possible.

Partner organisations working together to set up the UKSO, including the British Geological Survey, Cranfield University, NERC and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, said the initiative will play a key role in improving soil knowledge and developing better management practices, making sectors that rely on soil such as agriculture more sustainable in the long-term.   

Although UK institutes have amongst the most detailed and extensive soil data sets held anywhere in the world, these have until now been disparately distributed and difficult to access, so UKSO aims to improve the quality and coordination of national and regional soil-data resources.

Upon announcing the launch of UKSO, a CEH spokesperson said, "Soils contribute to the delivery of many ecosystem services, yet they are readily degraded and it is important that better methods are developed to conserve and improve this vital resource."

Dr Steve Hallett, who manages Cranfield's LandIS system, said, "This exciting new initiative provides an excellent impetus to draw the various scientific institutions together. It presents national and regional soil cartographic mapping and data, and soil monitoring resources, but importantly provides interested stakeholders a simple and effective means to explore that most precious of our natural resources – soil."

Soil degradation is a major problem facing the UK, as the last nationwide investigation into the issue, conducted in 2009, revealed a startling degree of erosion in UK soils. The country is losing topsoil at a rate of two million tonnes per year, which could have serious implications for long-term productivity.

There have been plans to develop a European framework to give soil legal protection as a finite resource, though a blocking minority of national governments have hindered the implementation of an EU Soil Directive, which has be stalled in its draft stage since 2006. Last year, the EU Commission announced that it would revisit and possibly scrap the draft as part of its 'fit for growth' package to make regulations "lighter, simpler and cheaper."  The process was slammed by environmentalists as "dangerous deregulation."

Reacting to the Commission's announcement last year, Dr Helaina Black, a senior soil scientist at the James Hutton Institute – one of the partners in UKSO – said, "My concern is that, without some form of framework, our pressing needs for adequate soil information, monitoring and research to support our agri-businesses and other industries will remain the 'poor cousin' relative to the effort and investment put into other natural resources where there is much existing legislation and regulation e.g. water, air and biodiversity conservation."

Research published in September by EU in-house science service the Joint Research Centre revealed that soil degradation tends to be a larger problem in those states that have resisted introducing binding measures to protect soils, including the UK.

The research revealed that soil biodiversity is under threat in 56 percent of EU territory. JRC scientists concluded that "intense land exploitation [is] estimated as the main pressure on soil biodiversity," and warned that "Due the combined effect of high intensity agriculture, many invasive species and an increased risk of organic carbon loss, the potential pressures were found to be particularly high in the UK and central Europe."