Alfred E Hartemink is a soil scientist and Head of the World Soil Museum at ISRIC - World Soil Information, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and Deputy Secretary General of the International Union of Soil Sciences. He is coordinator of the GlobalSoilMap.net project, joint editor-in-chief of the journal Geoderma, and author of the book Soil Fertility Decline in the Tropics: With Case Studies on Plantations (CABI Publishing, Wallingford, 2003), editor of The Future of Soil Science (IUSS, 2006) and co-editor of Digital Soil Mapping with Limited Data (Springer, 2008).