Objectives
The Soil Observatory aims at the development of pre-operational soil erosion risk assessment services which are in line with current EU policies and are based in the use of Earth Observation data, image analysis techniques and GIS models.
The specific objectives of the observatory are:
• To review the literature in order to select existing soil erosion risk assessment models that are GIS compatible and that could be used operationally.
• To benchmark the selected models at different scales and different test sites in order to define their advantages and disadvantages.
• To investigate how the selected models are affected by:
-the land cover by adapting different land cover classification schemes at different scales;
-the vegetation phenology and the way it changes over the year by producing a number of soil erosion risk maps of the same test site at different times of the year.
• To develop methods for the mapping of unexpected events such as forest fires and landslides which affect the cover and the use of the land (hot spot mapping).
Moreover, the observatory contributes in the development of a CORINE-type classification scheme that will be taking into account peculiarities related to the assessment of soil erosion risk.
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