Regionalization of soil degradation for the support of soil district designation in Hungary

The introduction of the Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience proposed by the European Parliament and Council is supposed to be preceded by specific preparatory works at Member State level, such as the definition of so-called soil districts together with the development of a soil monitoring system based on the elaborated zonalization. Three subsequent terms of Presidency of the Council of the European Union (Belgian, Hungarian, and Polish) aimed to finalize the concept elaboration and to legislate the Directive, so far without success. As a consequence, final delineation of soil districts could not been elaborated so far. Nevertheless, certain tests were carried out to establish a proper zonalization.

The first drafts of the text of the Directive introduced a set of criteria that seems relatively simple in the legislative formulation, however, their implementation by Member States poses several number of methodological challenges. In the present paper soil health is approached from soil degradation point of view and soil districts from the regionalization of soil degradation respectively, which latter has already been addressed from time to time in the last decades.

In the frame of Land Degradation Mapping Sub-project of PHARE MERA ’92 -, identification, delineation and description of Hungary’s major land degradation regions at 1:500,000 scale were accomplished by building and analyzing a digital land degradation geographic database in the late ‘90s. The applied GIS analysis techniques were mainly based on traditional cartographic methods and had not exploited the opportunities, which were later emerged in DSM.

The former initiative of the Commission of the European Communities by the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection proposed a comprehensive approach to soil protection with ample freedom on how to implement its requirements on the identification of threats and specific risk areas left to Member States. In 2007, the techniques available at that time provided by DSM together with the renewed interest in spatial delineation of areas endangered by various soil threats were combined for the recompilation of land degradation regions of Hungary. Different levels of specific threats were determined in the form of categories. For the overall characterization of degradation regions, indices were introduced serving as spatial land degradation indicators.

In the last decade the Hungarian soil spatial infrastructure (HSSI) has been renewed, GSM conform digital soil maps on primary together with certain secondary, derived soil properties were elaborated in the frame of DOSoReMI@hu. The work has been continued with the modelling of certain soil functions and (degradation) processes. For the support of Soil District designation all, nationally relevant soil degradation processes have been digitally (re)mapped using specific DSM approaches based on HSSI and relevant spatial environmental ancillary data. The newly (re)complied soil degradation maps have then been submitted to spatial classification procedures to regionalize the processes. The results of the various classification scenarios have been used to produce alternatives for soil districts.