The article was written with the contribution of Gergely Tóth, deputy director and was released in Modern Geográfia, Vol. 17. Issue 3, p. 61-69., in 2022.

Abstract

An irreversible consequence of urban expansion and industrial/infrastructural developments is that a significant extent of soil disappears in the affected area. In Hungary, no specific database shows the processes regarding soil degradation due to soil sealing, but remote sensing can contribute to this topic by providing relevant monitoring data on Earth’s surface. We evaluated the relationship between officially registered land withdrawal data and remote-sensed soil sealing data. For this, we collected land withdrawal data from the Zala County Government Office and compared them to the dataset of the LANDSUPPORT Decision Support System. Results show that the LANDSUPPORT data strongly correlate with the official data, which reliably indicates that soil sealing is related to land withdrawals. As the official data indicate the total area of land withdrawals and the LANDSUPPORT data indicate the sealed area, we could estimate the rate of soil sealing, which was 66% in the studied area.

Keywords: soil degradation, soil monitoring, soil sealing, remote-sensing

The article is available with full text HERE in Hungarian.