Digital processing and upgrading of legacy data collected during the 1:25 000 scale Kreybig soil survey

Abstract

The national soil-mapping project initiated and led by Kreybig was unique being a national, large-scale survey based on field and laboratory soil analysis and in the meantime serving practical purposes. By its completion, in the early 1950s, Hungary was the first country in the world having such detailed soil information for the whole country. The Kreybig maps are still timely, because the temporal changes in the mapped soil characteristics are not significant. The GIS adaptation of information originating from this survey is under construction, but there is more utilizable information originating from this survey, than it was published in the map series and in reports, and what is provided by simply archiving them digitally. Compilation of the Digital Kreybig Soil Information System as a national spatial soil information system involves both its integration within appropriate spatial data infrastructure and updating with efficient field correlation, which make an inherent refinement and upgrading of the system possible. The field-based updating of DKSIS using field GIS technology by the implication of recent data collected at revisited sites makes the comparison of archived and newly surveyed soil state possible. This, in one hand, should be recorded in the database by updating it. On the other hand, trends can be identified in soil characteristics, thus processes can be realized and/or forecasted. Based on the upgraded database we produce soil maps (i) displaying recent state of soils (ii) with increased accuracy and (iii) according to the soil-mapping concept elaborated by Kreybig et al.