European Soil Bureau ¾ Research Report No. 9
The European Soil Bureau Network
Luca Montanarella1
Robert J.A. Jones1,2
Jean Dusart1
1 European Commission, Directorate General JRC - Joint Research Centre,
TP 280, I-21020 Ispra (VA), ITALY
2 Cranfield University, Silsoe, Bedfordshire. MK45 4DT, UNITED KINGDOM
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Summary
The European Soil Bureau Network (ESBN), located at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra (I), was created in 1996 as a network of national soil science institutions. Its main tasks are to collect, harmonise, organise and distribute soil information for Europe. This paper describes the history, background and current work programme of the network.
The ESBN is experiencing a surge in the demand for soil information in Europe, for addressing a number of environmental problems and questions. These include: leaching of agrochemicals, deposition of heavy metals, disposal of waste (agricultural, domestic and industrial), degradation of soil structure (through loss of organic matter, salinisation and subsoil compaction), risk of erosion (by water and wind), immobilisation of radionuclides, supply of water at catchment level, assessing the suitability (and sustainability) for traditional and alternative crops, and estimation of soil stability. This report is an update on that published in the first edition (Bullock et al., 1999).
Introduction
The European Soil Bureau Network (ESBN) was created in 1996, as a network of national soil science institutions, managed through a permanent Secretariat located at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy. It is part of the Soil and Waste Unit (SWU) of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES), one of three institutes at the JRC’s Ispra site (Meyer-Roux and Montanarella, 1998).
The ESBN’s aim is to carry out scientific and technical work programmes in order to collect, harmonise organise and distribute soil information relevant to Community policies, to a number of
Directorates General (DG’s), to the European Environment Agency (EEA) and to individual Institutions of the EU Member States.
The origins of the ESB go back to the 1980s and are inextricably linked to the compilation of a European Soil Map and associated attribute databases. An EC Soil Map was produced at 1:1,000,000 scale in the 1970s by a loose network of academic soil scientists. The most important contributors to the map are listed below.
Belgium: J. Ameryckx, A. Louis, R. Maréchal, R. Tavernier; Denmark: K. Rasmussen; France: J. Dupuis, M. Jamagne, A. Mori, E. Servat; Germany: E. Mückenhausen; Greece: A. Koutalos, N. Yassoglou; Irish Republic: M. Gardiner, J. Lee; Italy: F. Mancini, R. Salandin; Luxembourg: A. Puraye, J. Wagener; Netherlands: H. De Bakker, J. Pons, J. Schelling, R. Van der Schans; Portugal: J. Carvalho Cardoso; Spain: A. Guerra, F. Monturiol; United Kingdom: B. Avery, R. Glentworth, R. Grant; FAO: R. Dudal; CEC: A. Cole, J. Gillot, A. Prendergast; Advisors: K. Beek, S. Lunt, G. Smith, C. Sys,; Computerisation: H.B. Madsen, A.M. Norr, S.W. Platou
The ‘digital age’ for European soil information effectively began in 1982 when a ‘Computerisation of Land Data Group’ (CLDG) was established by DGVI, comprising representatives of the main centres of expertise within the EC at that time. The work of the CLDG was executed under the guidance of the Land and Water Use Steering Committee of DGVI, now DG AGRI (Agriculture).
The first meeting of the group was in Ispra in 1982. Draft proposals for the compilation of a Land Data Catalogue for the whole of the EC were presented at the second CLDG meeting in Montpellier (1983).
In 1985, the EC Soil Map and legend (FAO-UNESCO, 1974) was finally published in 7 sheets and covered the EC-12 countries (CEC, 1985). It was printed on a base map provided by the UK Military Authorities with a topographical component compiled from the ONC-map series (Operational Navigational Chart Series).
The base map comprised the geodetic constants of a Lambert conformal conical projection. A manual, describing the soil map units and their contents, was also published with the maps. This task was completed in parallel with the work of the CLDG but provided a key foundation for the future of digital European Soil Data.
The group continued to meet annually until 1988 and it was responsible for a number of initiatives with respect to European soil and land data:
· Digitisation of the EC Soil Map (Platou et al,. 1989)
· Compilation of an EC Land Data Catalogue (Nørr, 1986)
· Proceedings of the Bonn (1986) and Pisa (1987) meetings (Jones and Biagi, 1989)
· Proceedings of the Wageningen meeting (1988) on applications of the digital EC Soil Map and climate data (van Lanen and Bregt, 1989)
In 1989, DGVI ceased funding the activities of the Computerisation of Land Data Group and a period of dormancy followed. However, there was still a need for such activities at a European level. The Directorate General for Agriculture (DG VI) MARS (Monitoring Agriculture with Remote Sensing) Project at JRC needed information on the water holding capacities of European soils for input to the crop growth monitoring system (CGMS) that was under development for forecasting the yields of the main agricultural crops throughout the continent (Vossen and Meyer-Roux, 1995).
This lead in 1990 to the setting up of a Soil and GIS Support Group funded by the MARS Project (JRC). In the previous year (1989), a meeting of Heads of European Soil Surveys was held at Silsoe (UK) to review the activities connected with soil survey and data collection throughout Europe (Hodgson, 1991).
In addition to providing MARS with data on the water holding capacities of soils in Europe, the Soil and GIS Support Group began work on a number of fundamental database projects:
1. A major update of the EC Soil Geographical Database (the digital version of the published EC Soil Map) described by King et al. (1995b);
2. The compilation of a soil profile analytical database (Madsen, 1991, Madsen and Jones, 1995);
3. Development of a pedotransfer rules database (King et al., 1994; van Ranst et al., 1995).
As a result of its expanding activities, the Soil and GIS Support Group was renamed, in 1992, the Soils Information Focal Point (SIFP) with a work programme devised by a Soil Information System Development (SISD) Committee, under the chairmanship of Dr. D. King (INRA, Orleans, Fr.). The Heads of Soil Surveys met again in December 1994, in Orleans. At this meeting (Le Bas and Jamagne, 1996), it became clear that the amount of soil survey and soil monitoring activity, being undertaken in the member states of the EU, had reduced significantly compared to 1989 (Hodgson, 1991).
In an effort to revive soil monitoring as an important research activity, a network of centres of excellence in soil hydrology was set up (in 1994) under the EU Human Capital and Mobility Programme. This began to produce data for computing pedotransfer functions for estimating the hydraulic properties of European soils (Bruand et al., 1997).
At the Athens meeting of the SIFP in 1996, the European Soil Bureau Network (ESBN) came into existence and the SISD evolved into the ESBN Scientific Committee. Table 1 charts the meetings of the ESBN and its predecessor organisations that have been associated with the computerisation of soil and land data in Europe. Much of the work undertaken by the Soil and GIS Support Group, the SIFP/SISD and the ESBN (in its first year) is described in King et al. (1995a) and Heineke et al. (1998).
European Soil Bureau Network
The activities of the ESBN are, and have always been, driven essentially by the demands for soil information by the EU Member States and the European Commission. The services most heavily involved in soil related policies are DG AGRI (Agriculture) and DG ENV (Environment), though recently a surge of interest in soil information has been observed coming from other Commission services. These are most notably DG REGIO (Regional policy) in relation to the European Spatial Planning Perspective (ESDP), and DG RELEX and DG DEV (Development) in relation to soil information in non-EU countries.
The extension of the European soil databases to non-EU countries has indeed been stimulated by the needs of these Directorates General. Specifically in the framework of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), there is the need for adequate soil information systems in the affected regions.
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Table 1 Meetings on the computerisation of soil and land data in Europe
Date / Location / Organiser1982 / JRC Ispra, Italy
1983 / INRA, Montpellier, France / Jean-Paul Legros
1984 / Bureau of Land Data (ADK), Vejle-Copenhagen, Denmark / Henrik Madsen
1985 / Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, London, UK / Doug Fitch
1986 / Ministry of Agriculture, Bonn, West Germany / E. C. Lapple
1987 / CNR Instituto Elaborazione Informazione, Pisa, Italy / Benedetto Biagi
1988 / Stiboka, Wageningen, The Netherlands / Johan Bouma
1989 / No meeting held
1990 / IRSA, JRC, Ispra, Italy / Paul Vossen
1991 / University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium / E. Van Ranst
1992 / Madrid, Spain / Juan Jose Ibanez
1993 / Geographical Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark / Henrik Madsen
1994 / BGR Hannover, Germany / Wolf Eckelmann
1995 / FAO, Roma, Italy / Freddy Nachtergaele
1996 / University of Athens, Athens, Greece / Nicholas Yassoglou
1997 / Regione Emilia Romagna, Bologna, Italy / Nicola Filippi, Luca Montanarella
1998 / No meeting held
1999 / Umweltbundesamt, Vienna, Austria / Gundula Prokop, Luca Montanarella
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Therefore significant extension of the current coverage of the soil databases, available from the ESBN, is foreseen in the future.
The European Soil Information System (EUSIS)
The core of this system is currently the European Soil Database, based on the 1:1,000,000 scale ‘Soil Geographical Database of Europe’ (Jamagne et al., 2001) that is currently covering Europe.
The database has been recently extended to cover countries in the Mediterranean basin, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belorus and Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union (Montanarella, 2001; Stolbovoi et al., 2001).
This new coverage also forms part of the joint Circumpolar Soil Database under development in collaboration with Canada (Agriculture Canada) and the United States of America (USDA-NRCS). This extension will serve as a tool for the more accurate estimation of soil organic carbon pools in the boreal areas and for estimates of potential changes in GHG emission in relation to changes of soil temperature regimes in these areas. A first version of this common Euro-Asian Soil Database is available (Figure 1).
EUSIS is developing into a multi-scale spatial system integrating data at different levels of detail into a single Geographic Information System (GIS) (King, et al., 1998; Montanarella, 1999).
It forms an essential link in the chain from global scale systems with the 1:5,000,000 scale World Soil and Terrain database (SOTER) (UNEP/ISSS/ISRIC/FAO, 1995) to detailed national, regional and local soil information systems, at scales 1:250,000 to 1:5,000, within the European Union, ensuring a coherent approach from the local to the global scale (Figure 2).
The system incorporates also a number of pedotransfer rules (Van Ranst et al., 1995) that allow the preparation of derived products, such as soil erosion risk maps, soil organic carbon estimates, susceptibility to subsoil compaction, water holding capacity and many others. More complex models (CGMS) use EUSIS for the early forecast of crop production in MARS, risk of desertification, groundwater vulnerability to agrochemicals, etc. Future developments will improve the links to other environmental databases – land cover/use, elevation, climate, geology and hydrology. Although there is considerable scope for improving the resolution and quality of the data currently incorporated, EUSIS remains the only soil information system covering the entire European continent. The main elements of are described in the sections below.
Soil Geographical Database of Europe at scale 1:1.000.000
Version 1 of this database (SGDBE) was digitised by Platou et al. (1989) for inclusion in the CORINE project (Co-ordination of Information on the Environment). To answer the needs of the, MARS Project (see above), the database was enriched in 1990-1991 from the archive documents of the original EC Soil Map and the resulting database became version 2. The work of the Soil and GIS Support Group of the MARS Project lead to version 3 of the database. A slightly updated version (3.2.8) of the Soil Geographical Database at scale 1:1,000,000, covering central and eastern European and Scandinavian countries (Jamagne et al., 1995), forms the core of version 1.0 of the European Soil Database.
The aim of the database is to provide a harmonised set of soil parameters, covering Europe (the enlarged EU) and bordering Mediterranean countries, to be used in agro-meteorological and environmental modelling at regional, national, and/or continental levels.
Recently the Soil Geographical Database of Europe (SGDBE) has been extended in version 4.0, to cover Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The most recent extension covers Iceland and the New Independent States (NIS) of Belarus, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Work is ongoing to incorporate soil data for other Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey.
In addition to these geographical extensions, the database has also experienced important changes during its lifetime. The latest major changes include the introduction of a new extended list of parent materials, and, for coding major soil types, the use of the new World Reference Base (WRB) for Soil Resources (FAO, 1998). The database is currently managed using the ArcGIS® Geographical Information System (GIS) software system and associated relational databases.
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