Towards Detailed and Public Data on Croatian Soil as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Environmental Management and Nature Conservation

Soil is an indispensable component of the terrestrial ecosystem. It is thus unimaginable to perform sustainable land management without information on the pedosphere, regularly collected by mapping pedocartographic units and/or sampling at typical locations for laboratory acquisition of physical and chemical parameters. Despite soil inventory having been done in Croatia for decades, complex interinstitutional relations with ohen poorly regulated jurisdiction, rights and obligations have led to the nonexistence of a public soil database to date, one that would assist in daily efforts of many stakeholders (farmers, foresters, conservationists, planners, consultants, authorities and various decision makers, among others), and would strongly improve environmental and natural resource management in our country. In a project implemented on behalf of the World Bank from 2020 to 2021, a 30 m resolution spatial dataset was produced with 16 standard pedological variables estimated by applying machine learning algorithms against satellite imagery alongside climatic, geological and geomorphometric indicators (for a total of 533 covariates), while unifying soil data from numerous sources, some of which are not publicly available, which limits the availability of the project results. However, subsequent analyses performed outside of the project and only on publicly available target data have yielded results of similar quality, providing new opportunity to many interested parties.