This article presents a discussion about the issue of soil resource management in the context of sustainable development. These resources are one of the basic resources on Earth, conditioning the sustainable development of present and future generations by providing the capacity for food production. The study contains an indicator-based assessment of changes in available soil resources as a result of progressive urbanization processes in the suburban area of a big city. The case study was the Wrocław Larger Urban Zone in Poland. The applied methodology allowed for the valorization of urban sprawl processes on agricultural land. As a result, municipalities were divided into groups that characterize different suburbanization processes and their impact on the available soil resources. By using the proposed approach, it is possible to support the spatial development management process in order to protect the valuable components of the environment. The results of the research show that 29 rural precincts located around Wrocław have a high soil transition index (W≥50), which proves their inefficient agricultural management system on a regional scale. The study is an attempt to answer a question on the practical implementation of sustainable development goals that were included in Agenda 2030.
At European scale, soil characteristics are needed to evaluate soil quality, soil health and soil‐based ecosystem services in the context of the European Green Deal. While some soil databases exist at the European scale, a much larger wealth of data is present in individual European countries, allowing a more detailed soil assessment. There is thus an urgent and crucial need to combine these data at the European scale. In the frame of a large European Joint Programme on agricultural soils launched by the European Commission, a survey was conducted in the spring of 2020, in the 24 European participating countries to assess the existing soil data sources, focusing on agricultural soils. The survey will become a contribution to the European Soil Observatory, launched in December 2020, which aims to collect metadata of soil databases related to all kind of land uses, including forest and urban soils. Based upon a comprehensive questionnaire, 170 soil databases were identified at local, regional and national scales. Soil parameters were divided into five groups: 1. main soil parameters according to the Global Soil Map specifications; 2. other soil chemical parameters; 3. other physical parameters; 4. other pedological parameters; and 5. soil biological features. A classification based on the environmental zones of Europe was used to distinguish the climatic zones. This survey shows that while most of the main pedological and chemical parameters are included in more than 70 % of the country soil databases, water content, contamination with organic pollutants and biological parameters are the least frequently reported parameters. Such differences will have consequences when developing an EU policy on soil health as proposed under the EU soil strategy for 2023 and using the data to derive soil health indicators. Many differences in the methods used in collecting, preparing, and analysing the soils were found, thus requiring harmonisation procedures and more cooperation among countries and with the EU to use the data at the European scale Additionally, choosing harmonized and useful interpretation and threshold values for EU soil indicators may be challenging due to the different methods used and the wide variety of soil land‐use and climate combinations influencing possible thresholds. The temporal scale of the soil databases reported is also extremely wide, starting from the ‘20s of the 20th century.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Abstract. this paper is a side effect of preparing international publications on our long term research on soils' susceptibility to wind erosion. For the paper to be internationally understandable we had to translate the texture classes from the Polish soil-agricultural maps (PtG1974), used as a basis to derive ten soil units investigated in the experiments, into the widely recognised USDA classification. We spotted that the PtG1974 classes of sandy soils, falling into USDA single SAnD class, have large, reaching 1620% difference in deflation rates, 25% in the case of LOAMy SAnD and SAnDy LOAM class the difference was 300%. the differences of this magnitude within a single textural class imply that the USDA classes may be too general to be used in some domains of environmental modelling. this also implies that translating soil kinds (soil textural classes) in Polish soil-agricultural maps into the USDA textural classes is not rational and may lead to the loss of spatial variability of soil cover and the loss of credibility in modelling of environmental phenomena.
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