ROMANIAN’S FOREST SOILS GIS MAP AND DATABASE AND THEIR ECOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS - Carpathian Journal of Earth And Environmental Sciences

Designing digital maps concerning forest soils constitutes a necessity both worldwide as well as at a national level. Presently there are many maps of these kind and geographic informatics systems (SOTER, EUSIS, LUCC). Among these can be found SIGSTAR 200, a system realized by the Pedological Research and Studies Institute ICPA Bucharest. The GIS forest soil map was realized starting from this system (by demarcating the soils that appear in the national forest fund). The soil variants were grouped in a number of 32 soil types and subtypes in accordance with Romania’s Soil Taxonomy System (SRTS 2003). Improvements were brought to the map by using the pedological database of the Forest Research and Management Institute (ICAS) (2665 soil profiles realized in the last 5 years within the National Forest Inventory) and the GIS maps of Romania’s geology and ecosystems. The superposition of the limits of forest districts and the production unities over the soil map allows a geographical disposition of soils within the administrative borders of our forest fund. Based on their repartition, the most important forest soils are the following: dystric cambosol, haplic luvosol and eutric cambosol, followed by entic podzol, preluvosol and dystric fluvisol. Significant differences were registered between the national soil distribution and the one from the forest fund: larger distributions at the national level for haplic phaeozem, chernozem and dystric fluvisols than in forests and the other way around, larger participation repartitions for forest dystric cambosol and haplic luvosol in comparison with the country’s average. The utility of this map, together with the afferent databases, can be observed in the forest management activity, for different national or international reports, in realizing other maps and databases, or in other economical or scientific activities.