Developer Portal
Getting started
Welcome to the iSDAsoil developer portal!
Please read on for information about how to use our APIs.
While API access is completely free under our licence, we ask that you read our terms of use before signing up for an API key. Once your key is provisioned, you should include it in API calls (except to the /docs API endpoint). If you would like to try out the API, scroll down to the Try it out section.
What can I do with the iSDAsoil API?
Our API will allow you to retrieve soil property and agronomy information for any location within Africa (excluding water bodies and deserts) by providing values for latitude and longitude. Most of our layers are at 30m resolution, except those provided by third parties. For further details on the available data, see our FAQ.
To query iSDAsoil
Data is accessed via the /soilproperty endpoint. If you are a first-time API user, you should begin by querying the /layers endpoint. Doing so will return metadata on the layers (soil properties) that can be accessed via the API, such as depths, units, uncertainty and the type of data returned. The property name (specified by value of the “property” object, e.g. “carbon_organic”) can then be used to request a property from the /soilproperty endpoint.
You must specify the latitude and longitude of the desired location, whereas other query parameters (depth and property) are optional. If you don’t specify the optional parameters, all of them are returned by default. If you require only a single property or depth, it’s always best to specify these other parameters, as doing so will improve performance compared to requesting all properties.
