Symposium no. 48 Paper no. 1692 Presentation: oral 1692-1 New approaches to the exploitation of former soil survey data BORUVKA Lubos, KOZAK Josef, NEMECEK Jan and PENIZEK Vit Department of Soil Science and Geology, Czech University of Agriculture in Prague, 165 21 Prague 6 - Suchdol, Czech Republic Abstract A number of soil data is available from the soil and land resource surveys carried out in the past. Modern mathematical and statistical methods and computer development enable new analyses and exploitation of these data. This is required by more complex understanding of soil functions, danger of soil degradation, different agricultural practices, etc. This contribution shows some examples of new exploitation of soil data resulting from a soil survey done in the 1960’s. Selected region is characterized by high heterogeneity and variability of soils and natural conditions in general. Characteristics (pH, CEC, organic carbon content, texture, etc.) of more than 600 profiles of agricultural soils were used. Different pedometric methods were applied to evaluate these data. Those included: 1) geostatistics for the analysis of soil spatial dependence and kriging for spatial prediction; 2) multivariate statistical and geostatistical methods for the analysis of interrelations among soil properties and for the determination of principal factors controlling soil heterogeneity in the region; 3) numerical classification for the delineation of soil categories defined according to different objectives (classical soil categorisation, soil vulnerability to pollution by risk elements, suitability to agricultural production, a.o.); 4) pedotransfer functions for modelling the behaviour of chemicals in soils. The results of numerical classification were compared to the results of traditional soil classification. The technology of geographical information systems was used for processing of the resulting applied maps. It was shown that the data of the former soil survey may be used for current purposes using modern methods of their processing. New soil surveys should be therefore focused mainly on special tasks on limited areas, verification of the older data, and validation of the results of mathematical simulation and prediction. Keywords: soil survey, pedometrics, geostatistics, GIS, spatial distribution, soil classification Introduction A wide range of pedometric techniques for analysing and processing of soil data has been introduced or developed, originating in the sphere of conventional statistics, geostatistics and other mathematical methods (Goovaerts, 1999; McBratney et al., 2000). However, there still must be data to be analysed or used as an input to prediction and simulation models. Soil survey presents still the most costly part in soil research. Therefore, it is desirable to have some procedures and methods for reasonable exploitation of data that are already available.