In the context of the European Union's Soil Thematic Strategy, policy makers require easy access to soil data and information of various types and scales to assess the state of soils at European level. To satisfy this need, the European Commission and the European Environment Agency (EEA) decided to establish the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC), located at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

The ESDAC is one of ten environmental data centres that have been established during the last 4 years in support of policy development, implementation and monitoring by the European Commission's Directorate General for Environment. The ESDAC, located at http://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu, has become the focal point for soil data and information at European Union level by hosting a series of soil products and web-based tools that allow access to the data. The ESDAC acts as the primary data contact point for the Commission and EEA to fulfill their information needs. The establishment and the evaluation of harmonised databases should facilitate improved soil protection measures.
Highlights

► The implementation of ESDAC emerges the future development of national soil data centres. ► The importance of ESDAC for policy makers both in European level and in national/regional level. ► The analysis results related to the application (use) of ESDAC datasets have given some interesting conclusions. For example, there is a high number of researchers that use ESDAC data for modeling, research projects, PhD thesis and other relative research purposes (Master dissertation, Postdoc, undergraduate).