Soil Sealing: Quantifying Impacts on Soil Functions by a Geospatial Decision Support System

Soil sealing is considered among the most dangerous of land degradation processes on global, European and national scales. Despite important policy documents aiming to mitigate this soil threat, it currently shows no signs of abating, and current efforts often do not result in appropriate implementation of soil sealing mitigation in spatial planning, which represents the subject area governing soil sealing. In this paper, we show a spatial decision support system - based on a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure - with the aim of applying it as an operational instrument aiming towards soil sealing mitigation. The system has the ambition to impact on those who take decision over soil sealing; typically, these are not agriculture experts but rather spatial planners. This tool, focusing on mitigating such crucial land degradation, allows the users - via the Web - to produce 'what-if' land planning scenarios thanks to the 'on-the-fly' modelling engines. Therefore, integrated geospatial quantitative data and procedures may be directly and freely used by planners. The tool has been applied to and tested in an area in the South of Italy. Results from two applications are reported: one addressing municipal planning and the other on a more detailed spatial scale. Furthermore, results include quantification of rural fragmentation, loss of soil ecosystem services and an estimate of soil sealing evolution over time. The tool was developed with the help of end users and indirectly explores a change of paradigm where soil science and landscape/urban planning work together to provide operational instruments that may be adopted by local communities in addressing soil sealing issues with a proactive approach.