Frequently asked questions

SoilHive is an open soil data infrastructure developed by Varda that aggregates soil data from multiple sources worldwide into a single collaborative platform. It is designed to improve access, management, and use of soil data across agriculture and environmental systems, making global soil information available to researchers, governments, agrifood companies, and developers.

SoilHive serves a broad range of users: soil scientists and researchers analyzing global soil health, national institutions and governments identifying data gaps, agrifood companies and agronomists optimizing crop and land management, organizations developing carbon credit and climate projects, and developers integrating soil data into their own applications via API.

SoilHive aggregates soil datasets from multiple global and regional sources, covering properties such as soil texture, organic carbon, composition, and more. Users can search by country, geographic region, drawn polygon. See the full list of available datasets here.

Yes. SoilHive is built as an open soil data infrastructure — anyone can discover, browse, compare, and download soil data at no cost. For organizations that need to privately manage, harmonize, and share soil data internally, SoilHive also offers a Private Data Hub with collaboration and access-control tools.

Yes. SoilHive provides a REST API for programmatic access to soil and spatial data for research, analysis, and application development. The API uses modern standards including JSON-LD and schema.org for structured, interoperable data. Full documentation and step-by-step integration examples are available at developer.soilhive.ag.

Yes. SoilHive is particularly relevant for carbon sequestration research, carbon credit certification, and climate risk assessment. Organizations working in these areas use SoilHive to access harmonized, comparable soil data across geographies and time periods — a key requirement for credible carbon baseline and monitoring work.

SoilHive aggregates soil data from diverse global datasets and harmonizes units of measurement across sources to enable meaningful comparison. The platform uses the Uber H3 geospatial indexing system to organize data into uniform hexagonal cells, ensuring consistent spatial analysis regardless of the original data source or format.

SoilHive welcomes data contributions from any organization or individual. See how you can do it here. Contributing data helps fill soil data gaps and supports better agricultural and environmental decisions worldwide.