National soil information and potential for delivering GlobalSoilMap products in France: a review
Résumé
This paper presents and discusses a review on the availability of the different of sources of information to build the GlobalSoilMap products at the scale of France. We investigated the content of the national soil database which gathered the data produced in the framework of the GIS Sol programs (e. g. IGCS, RMQS, BioSoil and BDAT). Two types of spatial information have driven our work: point data and polygon data. Firstly, we present for a set of GlobalSoilMap soil properties the number of soil profiles that fulfill the specifications for 6 depth intervals using density maps. Secondly, maps of the state of progress of the soil mapping and monitoring programs are discussed. Our results show that even if GlobalSoilMap products are potentially feasible with a few statistical challenges, the spatial and semantic quality will be indubitably heterogeneous.