A GIS-based layer of the soil map of Israel – Ravikovitch (1969)

Background

The soil map of Israel was first published by Rabinovitch et al. in 1969. It was a massive work that took place 5 years. The map was published in a printed format at a 1:250,000 scale. Until now, a digital version of this map was not available. Accordingly, we carefully digitized the soil map of Rabinovitch and provided the map herein.

Materials and Methods

This dataset contains georeferenced raster layers of the soil map (1:250,000) of Israel published by Ravikovitch (1969). The georectification was done using control points located on the borders of Israel. With this information, it was possible to create polygons over the georeferenced raster layers. This was done using the editing tool of ArcGIS 10.3. For each polygon we assigned the same classification provided by Ravikovitch (1969). Once all the polygons were created, topological corrections were applied using the method of Longley et al., (2015) in order to rectify possible inaccuracies in the digitation. To this end, we used the topology tool of ArcGIS 10.3 applying two rules:

polygons must not have gaps

polygons must not overlap.

Following these corrections, the polygons were re-evaluated and further edited where necessary to improve accuracy.

This publication contains:

the northern and the southern sections of the Israel map of soils after the georectification in geotif format

the final product of the cartographic edition of the Israel map of soils in shapefile format

Please, if you are going to make use of this map, refer to this work:

Francos, N., Karasik, E., Myers, M., Ben-Dor, E., 2025. Soil type classification using Landsat 8: a comparison between the USDA and a local system in Israel. International Soil and Water Conservation Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iswcr.2025.03.001