A GIS tool to express soil naturalness grades and geovisualization of results on Tokaj nagy-hill

Abstract

There are many possibilities for open access publishing of location-based information, as a result of the development of technology in the webGIS field. Concurrently, geovisualization facilitates the interpretation and analysis of spatial data. The aim of this study is to demonstrate a GIS tool that is able to automatically express the anthropogenic influences on soils based on land use/cover data and geovisualize their results on the web. We used ArcGIS and QGIS software for geoprocessing, classifying spatial data, and publishing them on the web. Generally, decreasing anthropogenic influence on soils could be detected on Tokaj-Nagy Hill throughout five investigation periods (1784-1858, 1858-1884, 1884-1940, 1940-1989, 1989-2010), as well as a decreasing intensity of human impacts. The results showed that representation of data with the geographic information system on the web is feasible, but also complex information from the map elements can be extracted which helps users better understand the spatial information.