SoilTemp, our project working towards a global database of soil temperatures for use in ecological analyses, launched its own website: soiltemp.weebly.com!

The website allows interested visitors to explore what the project is about and, most importantly, follow the growth of the database through an interactive map.

This map, courtesy of the Environment and Sustainability Institute of the University of Exeter and framed in a bigger effort to map all available microclimatic data across the globe, provides important information on logger locations, as well as details on time, height, resolution etc.

For scientists interested in using soil temperature data for their own analyses, this map is an amazing tool, as it provides an overview of datasets within regions of interest, as well as pointers to people to contact in order to set up collaborations. This is one of the key goals of our SoilTemp-project: we hope to set up international collaborations using data that for one scientist might be trivial, yet for another holds the key to answer important (micro)climatic and ecological questions.

The map is not done yet, and might very well never be: we will keep updating it with the countless datasets that are not yet processed, and that will keep flowing in in the future. For now, numbers are already bedazzling (and we are not even halfway through): 1867 temperature sensors from 11 countries, from sea level till 6194 meter above the ocean, and covering more than a decade.

We hope this coverage will only increase, so please get in touch if you have any soil temperature data you would like to share with us!