Large-scale soil maps and a supplementary database for land use planning in Estonia

Abstract

A soil map at the scale 1:10,000 serves as a major important document for land owners and local governments, which allows them to use soil information in their daily activity. The intensity of exploitation of soil maps will increase when the very map and its legend are supplemented, within colored and indexed polygons, with information about soil texture and reaction by layers, but also about the thickness and characterization of the epipedon, quality indices for soil assessment, classes of stoniness, and prevalent fractions of stones, erosion risk, etc. Special maps of agronomical status, with a list of proper measures for improvement of soils and their associations, should form a regular component of large-scale mapping. As decrease in arable land and increase in the forest area are common trends in land use, these maps and general soil data should serve as the fundamental source of information for decision making concerning land use. Data indicating the suitability of any soil for any crop should be entered in a database. Application of GIS on any level of national economy, digitization of a large-scale soil database and making it accessible to land users would allow to expand the amount of available information for each soil map polygon.