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.
