The data set consists of a southern African subset of the "Global Gridded Surfaces of Selected Soil Characteristics (IGBP-DIS)" produced by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme - Data and Information Services. Data files are provided in ASCII GRID format. The "Global Gridded Surfaces of Selected Soil Characteristics (IGBP-DIS)" data set contains seven data surfaces: soil-carbon density, total nitrogen density, field capacity, wilting point, profile available water capacity, thermal capacity, and bulk density. All the surfaces are global, at a resolution of 5 x 5 arc-minutes, in ASCII GRID format for ARC INFO. Each file contains a single ASCII array in a geographic (lat/long) projection. The ASCII files consist of header information containing a set of keywords, followed by cell values in row-major order.