The ENVIBASE-Project

Documentation / Online Handbook

Soil

All the cities have maps on geology, litology and/or pedology, at least with the FAO classification for agricultural purposes, but these maps are generally not very detailed (too large a scale) and show topics of marginal interest for the planning purposes in urban areas.

But the urban areas’ problems concerning soil have been taken into consideration and studied from quite different points of view:

• In Athens until now, it has been mainly a problem of flow off control (see map on equal inclinations, hydrolitology etc.). But the main problems have been shown to be soil sealing and also soil pollution due to the industrial presence in the area.
• Milan, Moscow and Berlin are cities with industrial settlements. All have all elaborated detailed soil pollution maps (Moscow) or even exact catasters of polluted sites (Berlin, Milan).
• Berlin has gathered data on urban soil types to study and analyse the biotic functions of the soil. But this kind of analysis was only possible thanks to the large amount of data derived from research projects of universities and other institutes.
• An interesting exception is Rome with its archeological and underground cavity maps. Soil pollution from old industrial activities indeed is a relatively rare problem in Rome, so that no map of this kind has been produced till now.

The basic map for the topic soil has shown to be the soil sealing map, as it points out an omni-present problem and is also needed to derive other environmental information. The information from this map has been elaborated by the EIS Berlin to deduct the maps of flow off, ground water regeneration rate and climatic functions in the urban area.

Indications for the most commonly produced and important maps/results for an Environmental Information System

• Pedology
• Geology
• Morphology, height lines
• Soil sealing: It indicates if the natural soil functions of percolation (enrichment of ground water, flow off reduction), evaporation (microclimatic balance) and natural habitat for fauna and flora (presence of vegetation biotopes) are still preserved, reduced or totally lost (with all the negative effects).
• Soil contamination, polluted sites cadaster: these maps are of big importance for the ground water pollution control and from the economic point of view for planning new investments on these sites.