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Irene Rischia, APAT - Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and for Technical Services (Italy)
Marco Di Leginio, APAT - Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and for Technical Services (Italy)
Fiorenzo Fumanti, APAT - Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and for Technical Services (Italy)
Paolo Giandon, ARPAV - Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto (Italy)
Silvia Obber, ARPAV - Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto (Italy)
Irene Rischia, APAT - Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and for Technical Services (Italy)
Ialina Vinci, ARPAV - Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto (Italy)
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Erosion and loss of organic matter of soils are two of the threats identified by the European Communication "Towards a Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection"(2002/179), but the comparability of information on soils in Europe is limited since it is based on few data, collected over a long time span using different methodologies. Over time a more harmonised monitoring approach and methodology is envisaged in the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection (COM 2006, 231). As the Italian policy makers and scientific community is also currently very much interested in erosion and organic matter content of soils, a new approach that exploits soil data and expertise available at local level, has been developed in a pilot project that involves the Italian National Environment Agency, Regional Soil Survey Services and European Soil Bureau, named SIAS project. The SIAS project concerns the building of soil environmental indicators (erosion and organic matter content) based on harmonisation of regional data and according with the directive proposal for establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe. The main aims of the SIAS project can be summarised in: § exploiting at most the existing information; § obtaining a low-cost harmonisation of the pedological data; § obtaining interregional harmonisation of the information related to the indicators selected as of first priority; § developing environmental indicators in a relatively short time. To simplify harmonization problems and in order to set up a common infrastructure for data sharing, it was chosen to assess and represent output data by means of a reference grid (of 1km pixels), built following the recommendations of the Eurogrid/INSPIRE Directive. Furthermore an exchange format for storing data and metadata information has been set up jointly by the working group. Record of all this, procedures and kind of input data, is stored in another section of the format, that collects metadata. Great effort has been set in the definition of shared data quality indicators, both as quantitative indexes of data availability and specific confidence levels, defined for soil information in general and for each soil indicator assessment. This could be the first step to reach an harmonisation of soil information in Italy periodically updated by regional soil surveys that are the producers of soil related information in the country.
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