SERENA EJPSOIL BE Flanders soil sealing cookbook

The internal EJP SOIL project SERENA contributed to the evaluation of soil multifunctionality aiming at providing assessment tools for land planning and soil policies at different scales. By co-working with relevant stakeholders, the project provided co-developed indicators and associated cookbooks to assess and map them, to report both on soil degradation, soil-based ecosystem services and their bundles, under actual conditions and for climate and land-use changes, at the regional, national and European scales.

The data was prepared according to the Level 2 methodology of the SERENA soil sealing cookbook. For Belgium, the application was carried out at the regional scale for the Flanders region.
 
The automatically generated yearly soil sealing maps (1 m resolution GeoTIFF rasters) combine “known” sealing from administrative databases (buildings and transport infrastructure) with modelled sealing based on artificial intelligence. Administrative databases do not (adequately) cover parking lots, private driveways and garden terraces, which are a substantial part of the sealed area in Flanders. Hence, a machine learning model was built for deriving this remaining sealing from aerial imagery. For this purpose, an assessor manually labeled the sealed parts on a subset of the images. Based on this training set, a convolutional neural network model was used to produce a sealing probability map, which was converted to a binary modelled sealing map. Finally, a continuity correction was applied to ensure a temporally consistent result across the yearly maps.  

The objective of the SERENA project was to develop methods to calculate and map soil-based ecosystem services and soil threats. The selected indicator was the degree of soil sealing. By evaluating this degree at two moments in time, the change in soil sealing can be determined.  
 
The following data were used: 

• Large-scale Reference Database (Grootschalig Referentiebestand or Basiskaart), the digital topographic reference map for Flanders (vector) 

• Medium-scale annual winter aerial images of Flanders (15 or 25 cm raster resolution)

This dataset is originally hosted at Geopunt (www.geopunt.be). For the most up-to-date version of the dataset, please access the data from the Geopunt repository.