CGMS soil Suitability Criteria
Analysis of CGMS and ESCAPE suitability maps
On the basis of these criteria in both ESCAPE and CGMS various suitability maps have been created on the basis of the same data set (SGDBE version 4). According to the requirements of the study, the only distinction was between suited and not suited, and no distinction was made between degrees of suitability, e.g. highly suitable and moderately suitable. The suitability is assessed for each Single Typological Unit (STU) separately. For the mapping all suitable STUs within a Soil Mapping Unit (SMU) were aggregated and the area percentage of suitable STUs per SMU has been mapped. For the sake of comparison the current suitability maps used in CGMS have been prepared in the same way. These latter maps are the result of applying the CGMS suitability rules to the version 3.2 of the Soil map of Europe.
The various suitability maps have been compared with each other and with the European Land Cover Database (Mucher, 2004), especially to check the relationship between the occurrence of suitable soils and the agricultural land cover classes, such as:
- non-irrigated arable land;
- permanently irrigated land;
- annual & permanent crops;
- complex cultivation patterns;
- pastures.
The SGDBE version 4 covers Europe completely, and all Mediterranean countries, Iceland and the Asian part of Russia all the way east to the Pacific. However, the discussion on suitability maps and their comparison with land cover maps is limited to the European areas, i.e. Europe west of the Ural, and Turkey.
