Australian Soil Resource Information System Website

Full description

The ASRIS website provided online access to the best publicly available information on soil and land resources in a consistent format across Australia from its launch in 2005, until June 2024.
ASRIS provided access to information at seven different scales.
The upper-three scales provide general descriptions of soil types, landforms and regolith across the continent. This was based on the Physiographic Regions of Australia (https://doi.org/10.4225/08/579E72EA873CA).
The lower scales provide more detailed information in regions where mapping was complete with a harmonised version of state and territory survey mapping providing the foundation. Information related to soil depth, water storage, permeability, fertility, carbon and erodibility. Most soil information was recorded at five depths. The original soil survey information is still available from each of the jurisdictional custodians.
The lowest scale consists of a soil profile database with fully characterised sites that are known to be representative of significant areas and environments. This level of detail is now available for download from ANSIS (http://ansis.net)
The ASRIS mapping tool broke at the end of 2023 and could not be fixed due to aging infrastructure, changing technologies and cyber security demands that could no longer support the environment. This metadata entry describes the content that was available on the site. Any data that was accessible from ASRIS, can still be accessed by contacting the custodian of the data.

Lineage: The soil survey data that was displayed in ASRIS, was harmonised by each of the state and territory government agencies, to allow it work together for a National perspective on Australian Soil. A data schema was developed (described in the technical specifications) and each custodian transformed their data so that it was possible to query and analyse data across multiple jurisdictions. The data was provided to CSIRO to compile and create online maps for people to explore. The mapping tool was built by ESRI Australia using ArcIMS and allowed users to explore, zoom in and out and query the harmonised attributes. Additional tools allowed uses to see the spread of data values within polygon areas, giving an in depth view of the variation of properties such as pH, within mapped areas, ensuring users could understand the averaging effect of area weighted values necessarily included within soil units.