A new Geo-Lithological Map (Geo-LiM) for Central Europe (Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and Northern Italy)

The map is made available in GPKG format (the filename is "full_geo_lim_3035.gpkg" - QGIS and other Open Source GIS can deal with this format) Along with the map, we provide: 1) the original national geological maps of Germany, Italy, Slovenia, France, Switzerland and Austria, used for creating the map (folder "original_maps" in the "scripts" folder); 2) a script ("build_geo_lim.sh" in the "scripts" folder) that can be used to replicate the classification and the union of the original maps. The script was tested in a Ubuntu 16.04 environment where GRASS GIS 7.4 is installed. In order to run the script, the following command must be executed inside the "scripts" folder: grass74 -c datagrass/geo_lim/geo_lim/ --exec bash build_geo_lim.sh The "sql" folder contains the rules (exploited by the main "build_geo_lim.sh" script) for the classification of the geological formations into lithological units. Users can conveniently change those rules in order to change the final classification. For the elaboration of the GIS-based simplified geo-lithological map (Geo-LiM), we took advantage of the geological layers, in vector format, extracted from (i) the geological map of Italy at 1:500,000 scale (http://www.isprambiente.gov.it), (ii) the geological map of Switzerland at 1:500,000 scale (http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch), (iii) the geological map of Germany at 1:1,000,000 scale (Geologische Karte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1:1,000,000, BGR, Hannover.), (iv) the geological map of Austria at 1:500,000 scale (www.geologie.ac.at), (v) the geological map of France at 1:1,000,000 scale, and (vi) the geological map of Slovenia at 1:250,000 scale. These two last maps were obtained from the European Geological Data Infrastructure (EGDI - http://www.europe-geology.eu/metadata/). The six maps are released in ESRI shapefile, having different coordinate reference systems and different accuracy and information quality. The layers of France, Germany and Slovenia contained some topological errors (e.g. gaps between polygon borders, overlapping polygon borders, etc...) and were corrected removing duplicate boundaries and areas smaller than, respectively, 1 square meter, 600 square meters and 50 square meters (the longest boundary with adjacent area was removed). M. Donnini was supported by a grant of the Fondazione Assicurazioni Generali, and A. Zucchini was partially supported by the research projects of Paola Comodi, Francesco Frondini e Diego Perugini of the Department of Physics and Geology of the University of Perugia.