Integrating New Soil Data into the European Soil Database 1:1.000.000: A New Approach Tested in Turkey

The European Soil Database (ESDB) version 2.0, released in 2004, is the resulting product of a collaborative project involving all countries of the European Union and a large part of the former USSR. The ESDB is the only harmonized soil database across Europe. It consists of a number of components including: the Soil Geographical Database of Eurasia (SGDBE) at scale 1:1,000,000, which is a digitized European soil map and related attributes; a PedoTransfer Rules Database (PTRDB), which is a set of attributes that have been derived using pedotransfer rules on the attributes of the SGDBE; and the Soil Profile Analytical Database of Europe (SPADBE), that contains a number of observed and estimated soil profiles for Europe. The ESDB has been used successfully in numerous applications at European scale, as documented by the European Soil Data Centre that acts as custodian of the database. The European Soil Database (ESDB) aims at providing users with a harmonized set of soil parameters for agro-meteorological and environmental modelling at regional, national, and continental level for Eurasia and North African countries. The next revision (version 3.0) sees an extension into the Mediterranean Basin through the inclusion of data for Turkey. The development of a soil geographical database for Turkey at a scale of 1:1,000,000 under a common understanding and nomenclature allows the integration of these data into the existing ESDB. In order to comply with its structure, a number of key attributes (soil texture, parent material, WRB classification, land use) have been derived from supplementary local, regional and national soil datasets while other attributes have been obtained from auxiliary environmental datasets derived by remote sensing systems and geospatial processing techniques such as interpolation.

JRC.H.5 - Land Resources Management