The first country wide soil map at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (BUEK1000) has been compiled on the basis of published soil maps of the former German Democratic Republic and the pre 1990 federal states of Germany. To do this, it was necessary to match the soil systems used in East and West Germany and to develop standardized descriptions of soil units. A relatively homogeneous map has resulted, which permits uniform assessment of the soils throughout Germany. The map shows 71 soil mapping units, described in the legend on the basis of the German and FAO soil systems. Each soil unit has been assigned a characteristic soil profile (Leitprofil) as an aid to map interpretation. For the first time the subdivision of the country into 12 soil regions has been represented on the map. This subdivision was coordinated with the state Geological Surveys. These soil regions will represent the highest hierarchic level of nation wide soil maps in future. The colours of soil units correspond to the standards of the 'Bodenkundliche Kartieranleitung' (KA 3; Guidelines for Soil Mapping). The various hues characterize differences in relief or soil humidity. The BUEK1000 was produced digitally. It is an important part of the spatial database integrated in the Soil Information System currently being established at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (FISBo BGR). It can be used together with the characteristic soil profiles to derive thematic maps related to nation wide soil protection. The scale of the BUEK1000 makes it especially suitable for small scale evaluations at federal or EU level.
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Riverine flood hazard: The GAR 15 global flood hazard assessment uses a probabilistic approach for modelling riverine flood major river basins around the globe. The main steps in this methodology consists of: Compiling a global database of stream-flow data, merging different sources gathering more than 8000 stations over the globe. Calculating river discharge quantiles at various river sections. In another word calculating the range of possible discharges from very low to the maximum possible at series of locations along the river. The time span in the global stream-flow dataset is long enough to allow extreme value analysis. Where time series of flow discharges were too short or incomplete, they were improved with proxy data from stations located in the same “homogeneous region.” Homogeneous regions were calculated taking into account information such as climatic zones, hydrological characteristics of the catchments, and statistical parameters of the streamflow data. The calculated discharge quantiles were introduced to river sections, whose geometries were derived from topographic data (SRTM), and used with a simplified approach (based on Manning’s equation) to model water levels downstream. This procedure allowed for the determination of the reference Flood hazard maps for different return periods (6 are shown in the global study: T= 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 years). The hazard maps are developed at 1kmx1km resolution. Such maps have been validated against satellite flood footprints from different sources (DFO archive, UNOSAT flood portal) and well performed especially for the big events For smaller events (lower return periods), the GAR Flood hazard maps tend to overestimate with respect to similar maps produced locally (hazard maps where available for some countries and were used as benchmark). The main issue being that, due to the resolution, the GAR flood maps do not take into account flood defences that are normally present to preserve the value exposed to floods. This can influence strongly the results of the risk calculations and especially of the economic parameters. In order to tackle this problem some post processing of the maps has been performed, based on the assumption that flood defences tend to be higher where the exposed value is high and then suddenly drop as this value reduces. The flood hazard assessment was conducted by CIMA Foundation and UNEP-GRID. The flood maps with associated probability of occurrence, is then used by CIMNE as input to the computation of the flood risk for GAR15 as Average Annual Loss values in each country. Hazard maps for six main return periods are developed and available, and probable maximum loss calculations are underway which will be available within few months of GAR15 launch. For GAR15, the risk was calculated with the CAPRA-GIS platform which is risk modelling tool of the CAPRA suite (www.ecapra.org). More information about the flood hazard assessment can be found in the background paper (CIMA Foundation, 2015).
The Soil and Terrain Database for Northeastern Africa contains land resource information on soils, physiography, geology and vegetation for the following ten countries: Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. The information is accessible with an easy-to-use viewer program and is also stored in vector Arc/Info export format. Information on individual soil properties with class values is also given. A land suitability assessment for irrigated and upland crops for each unit is included. The scale ofthe source material is variable and ranges between 1:1 million and 1:2 million. A user manual for the viewer program and background information on the collected and correlated land resource materials are contained in filed documents.
Soils are classified in the Revised Legend; physiographic and lithology information was collected using an earlier draft version of the SOTER manual.
The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) -- Sudan, Kenya, Djibouti, Somalia, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia -- Crop Production System Zones (CPSZ) software is a detailed database that provides background information about actual farming in the region. It comes with a program (CVIEW, a CPSZ viewer) that displays maps, zooms in and out, and provides export facilities for the maps in image format and for the actual data in text format. The elementary mapping unit is a compromise between administrative units and agro-ecological zones: whenever steep agro-ecological gradients exist, administrative units are subdivided, thus resulting in 1200 mapping units that are homogeneous from an agro-ecological point of view, while retaining the compatibility with the administrative units used for most socio-economic variables in agricultural planning.
The just over 500 mappable variables are subdivided into several categories covering the spectrum from agronomy and livestock to the physical environment. For each mapping unit, detailed information is also presented on the crop calendar, typical yields and main pests and diseases.
This CD-ROM contains a collection of land and natural resource information for Northeastern Africa, in particular for the IGAD countries bordering the Nile basin. It includes data on administrative boundaries, rivers and lakes, soil and terrain, climatology, land use, physiography, geology and natural vegetation in easily accessible format.
Soil and Terrain Database for Northeasterm Africa (1:1 Million Scale) and Crop Production System Zones of the IGAD Subregion is provided on CD-ROM by the FAO, Land and Water Digital Media Series (Number 2). The CD-ROM can be purchased (Price: US$40) from FAO, Sales and Marketing Group, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 0100 Rome, Italy (Fax: +39-06-5705-3360 E-mail: publications-sales@fao.org).
The feature class MO_clivometria_poly_7 represents homogeneous slope areas — elements acquired from the geomorphological map at a scale of 1:25 000. The maps PTPAAV (Territorial Environmental Country Plan of Area Vasta) are a series of thematic maps drawn up since 1989 and finished and approved at the end of November 1991, are divided into territorial areas for a total of 8 areas identified on the regional territory. The work was carried out by several groups of technicians, a coordination group which established by circulars the standards to be used for the drafting of plans ranging from the thickness of the graph tip to the type of retino and the nuances to be used, and 8 design groups one for each area, which have created the maps trying to standardise spatial information as much as possible. The paperwork of this work was delivered to us in 2008 by the Environmental Heritage Office of the Molise Region. The latter already had scans of some thematic cards related to some areas, the missing ones and in the case of scans not found suitable for georeference, have been scanned. The mapping basis used by the working groups for the creation of PTPAAV maps was the IGM on a scale of 1:25,000.
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License information was derived automatically
This document reports the metadata and a figure of the pedogenon map for the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, which was developed with the aim of delineating soil units according to the proposal for the Soil Monitoring and Resilience Law (Soil Monitoring Directive). The resolution from 10 April 2024 by the European Parliament on the the proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Soil Monitoring and Resilience Law (Soil Monitoring Law) (COM(2023)0416 – C9-0234/2023 – 2023/0232(COD)) proposes that Member States establish soil units for the monitoring and assessment of soil health across all their territory. These soil units should be defined seeking homogeneity in regard to soil type (IUSS Working Group WRB, 2022), climatic conditions, and land use or land cover Soil units are gathered under the governance of administrative districts, i.e., soil districts (European Commission, 2023; General Secretariat of the Council, 2024). “Soil districts should constitute the basic governance units to manage soils and to take measures to comply with the requirements laid down in this Directive, in particular with regard to the monitoring and assessment of soil health”(European Commission, 2023).
The main objective of SELVANS WP1 Pedogenon mapping in the context of long-term intensive land use was to adapt and improve the digital soil mapping (DSM) framework for pedogenon mapping of forest soils at regional and local scales, and specifically, to apply pedogenon mapping for delineating soil units for Euskadi. Pedogenon classes are a conceptual taxa that aim to define groups of homogeneous environmental variables. These groups are created applying unsupervised classification to a set of state variables, proxies of the soil-forming factors for a given reference time. The assumption is that the soil-forming processes within these classes (i.e., pedogenons) have been relatively similar over pedogenetic time and thus have developed soils with similar properties. Pedogenon classes can afterwards be divided into subclasses along a gradient from less (i.e., genosoils) to more anthropogenic pressure on soils (i.e., phenosoils), in an analogous way to the concept of genoform and phenoform (Rossiter and Bouma, 2018). The conceptualization and methodology for pedogenon mapping is explained with more detail in Román Dobarco et al. (2021).
The goals of pedogenon mapping are:
The optimal number of soil units for Euskadi was nine, and the resulting pedogenon classes reflected the influence of climate, potential vegetation, relief and parent material. The choice of the optimal number of soil units was based on several criteria: minimum of three observations of the Basque forest soil monitoring network (BASONET) per soil district, maximising the compactness of the soil units in terms of the environmental variables used for k-means clustering (Calinski-Harabasz index), and minimising the ratio of within-district to between-district soil profile distances, using the BASONET data on clay, silt, and effective cation exchange capacity from 0-20 cm and 20-40 cm depth as soil variables. The resulting map of soil units designates a soil district with numbers from 1 to 9.
References
European Commission, 2023. Proposal for a DIRECTIVE of the EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT and of the COUNCIL on Soil Monitoring and Resilience (Soil Monitoring Law) (No. COM(2023) 416 final). European Commission, Brussels.
General Secretariat of the Council, 2024. General approach on the Proposal for a DIRECTIVE of the EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT and of the COUNCIL on Soil Monitoring and Resilience (Soil Monitoring Law) (No. 2023/0232(COD)). Council of the European Union, Brussels.
IUSS Working Group WRB, 2022. World Reference Base for Soil Resources. International soil classification system for naming soils and creating legends for soil maps., 4th edition. ed. International Union of Soil Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
Román Dobarco, M., McBratney, A., Minasny, B., Malone, B., 2021. A modelling framework for pedogenon mapping. Geoderma, 393, p.115012. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2021.115012" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2021.115012
Rossiter, D.G., Bouma, J. (2018). A new look at soil phenoforms–Definition, identification, mapping. Geoderma, 314, 113-121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2017.11.002" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2017.11.002
The feature class MO_clivometria_poly_6 represents the area with homogeneous pandence — elements acquired from the map of clivometry in scale 1:25 000 The maps PTPAAV (Territorial Environmental Country Plan of Large Area) are a series of thematic maps drawn up since 1989 and finished and approved at the end of November 1991, are divided into territorial areas for a total of 8 areas identified on the regional territory. The work was carried out by several groups of technicians, a coordination group which established by circulars the standards to be used for the drafting of plans ranging from the thickness of the graph tip to the type of retino and the nuances to be used, and 8 design groups one for each area, which have created the maps trying to standardise spatial information as much as possible. The paperwork of this work was delivered to us in 2008 by the Environmental Heritage Office of the Molise Region. The latter already had scans of some thematic cards related to some areas, the missing ones and in the case of scans not found suitable for georeference, have been scanned. The mapping basis used by the working groups for the creation of PTPAAV maps was the IGM on a scale of 1:25,000.
Floods: areas prone to flood events with 100-year return period - baseline (1981-2010). Within the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 (GAR15), the global flood hazard assessment uses a probabilistic approach for modelling riverine flood major river basins around the globe. The time span in the global stream-flow dataset is long enough to allow extreme value analysis. Where time series of flow discharges were too short or incomplete, they were improved with proxy data from stations located in the same “homogeneous region.” Homogeneous regions were calculated taking into account information such as climatic zones, hydrological characteristics of the catchments, and statistical parameters of the streamflow data. - The calculated discharge quantiles were introduced to river sections, whose geometries were derived from topographic data (SRTM), and used with a simplified approach (based on Manning’s equation) to model water levels downstream. This procedure allowed for the determination of the reference Flood hazard maps for different return periods (6 are shown in the global study: T= 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 years). The hazard maps are developed at 1kmx1km resolution. Such maps have been validated against satellite flood footprints from different sources (DFO archive, UNOSAT flood portal) and well performed especially for the big events For smaller events (lower return periods), the GAR Flood hazard maps tend to overestimate with respect to similar maps produced locally (hazard maps where available for some countries and were used as benchmark). Source: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) GAR15
The feature class MO_geopedologica_poly_1 represents the areas with homogeneous soil types, elements acquired from the geopedological map and crop aptitudes at a scale of 1:25 000. The maps PTPAAV (Territorial Environmental Country Plan of Area Vasta) are a series of thematic maps drawn up since 1989 and finished and approved at the end of November 1991, are divided into territorial areas for a total of 8 areas identified on the regional territory. The work was carried out by several groups of technicians, a coordination group which established by circulars the standards to be used for the drafting of plans ranging from the thickness of the graph tip to the type of retino and the nuances to be used, and 8 design groups one for each area, which have created the maps trying to standardise spatial information as much as possible. The paperwork of this work was delivered to us in 2008 by the Environmental Heritage Office of the Molise Region. The latter already had scans of some thematic cards related to some areas, the missing ones and in the case of scans not found suitable for georeference, have been scanned. The mapping basis used by the working groups for the creation of PTPAAV maps was the IGM on a scale of 1:25,000.
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The first country wide soil map at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (BUEK1000) has been compiled on the basis of published soil maps of the former German Democratic Republic and the pre 1990 federal states of Germany. To do this, it was necessary to match the soil systems used in East and West Germany and to develop standardized descriptions of soil units. A relatively homogeneous map has resulted, which permits uniform assessment of the soils throughout Germany. The map shows 71 soil mapping units, described in the legend on the basis of the German and FAO soil systems. Each soil unit has been assigned a characteristic soil profile (Leitprofil) as an aid to map interpretation. For the first time the subdivision of the country into 12 soil regions has been represented on the map. This subdivision was coordinated with the state Geological Surveys. These soil regions will represent the highest hierarchic level of nation wide soil maps in future. The colours of soil units correspond to the standards of the 'Bodenkundliche Kartieranleitung' (KA 3; Guidelines for Soil Mapping). The various hues characterize differences in relief or soil humidity. The BUEK1000 was produced digitally. It is an important part of the spatial database integrated in the Soil Information System currently being established at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (FISBo BGR). It can be used together with the characteristic soil profiles to derive thematic maps related to nation wide soil protection. The scale of the BUEK1000 makes it especially suitable for small scale evaluations at federal or EU level.