Alternate title

GEMAS Geochemical Mapping of Agricultural and Grazing Land Soil of Europe.

Date ( Creation )

2008-01-12T00:00:00

Date ( Publication )

2014-04-10T00:00:00

Date ( Revision )

2016-04-10T00:00:00

Identifier

INSPIRE UUID / GE.IE.GSI.GEMAS

Purpose

The GEMAS (geochemical regional mapping of agricultural soils and grazing land of Europe) project aims at providing harmonized geochemical data of arable land and land under permanent grass cover at the continental, European scale.

EU Soil Protection Directive (Van Camp et al., 2004; EC, 2006b), require additional knowledge about "soil quality" at the European scale. REACH specifies that industry must prove that it can produce and use its substances safely.

The GEMAS project will deliver good quality and comparable exposure data of metals in agricultural and grazing land soil; soil properties known to influence the bioavailability and toxicity of metals (and other elements) will also be determined in soil at the European scale. Sample coverage for agricultural soil (Ap-samples) and land under permanent grass cover (grazing land, Gr-samples).

Results from the GEMAS project offer a variety of applications. One of them is the establishment of a ’soil sample archive’ recording the status of European agricultural and grazing land soil in the year 2008. GEMAS data define the geochemical baseline for risk evaluation related to exposure of chemicals in agricultural soil and grazing land soil, as required by REACH regulation.

Status

completed Completed

Maintenance and update frequency

asNeeded As needed

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ( Theme )

• Geology

GEMET - Concepts, version 3.1 ( Theme )

• soil, groundwater, water (geographic), land, metal, chemical

Geonames ( Place )

• Ireland, Europe

GEMET - Concepts, version 3.1 ( Stratum )

• pedosphere, lithosphere

U.S. Geological Survey Thesaurus ( Theme )

• geochemistry, soil chemistry, agriculture

Use limitation

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Use limitation

no limitations to public access

Access constraints

license License

Use constraints

license License

Other constraints

Data that is produced directly by the Geological Survey Ireland (GSI) is free for use under the conditions of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

Under the CC-BY Licence, users must acknowledge the source of the Information in their product or application.

Please use this specific attribution statement: "Contains Irish Public Sector Data (Geological Survey Ireland) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence".

In cases where it is not practical to use the statement users may include a URI or hyperlink to a resource that contains the required attribution statement.

Spatial representation type

vector Vector

Denominator

1000000

Metadata language

eng English

Character set

utf8 UTF8

Topic category

• Geoscientific information
• Environment

Reference system identifier

4326 / http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/EPSG/0/4326

Distribution format

• ESRI REST (v10.x )

• WMS (1.3.0 )

OnLine resource

ESRI REST  

ESRI REST API

OnLine resource

WMS  

WMS

Hierarchy level

Dataset

Statement

•Application of the data:

The GEMAS project started in 2008 and delivered a book publication on results in December 2013. The dataset is freely available to the general public. As key results, it was observed:

- Large differences in the concentration of chemical elements between the soil of northern and southern Europe: in the northern Europe the concentrations for many elements were 2/3 times lower than in the southern Europe soil;

- Element distributions depend on geology and climate, and anthropogenic impact is hardly detectable at the European scale;

- Risk assessment for metals like Cu have shown that few samples have such high concentrations that they pose a toxic risk for soil organisms;

- Several important trace elements show low levels over sizeable tracts of land in Europe, that trace element deficiency is clearly of concern.

Results from the GEMAS project offer a variety of applications. One of them is the establishment of a ’soil sample archive’ recording the status of European agricultural and grazing land soil in the year 2008. GEMAS data define the geochemical baseline for risk evaluation related to exposure of chemicals in agricultural soil and grazing land soil, as required by REACH regulation.

•Sources of Information:

GEMAS project, involving 33 European countries, is a cooperation project between EuroGeoSurveys through its Geochemical Expert Group, and Eurometaux, the European Association of Metals.

http://gemas.geolba.ac.at/

In 2016 the Geological Survey of Ireland as a European partner contributes to GEMAS and EGDI (European Geological Data Infrastructure) with providing GIS spatial data classification and publication of WMS geochemical web mapping services to support European data interoperability of EGDI web portal.

The GIS GEMAS sample classification were constructed in ArcGIS 10.1 and the original GEMAS dataset is available as ESRI shapefile format.

Metadata

File identifier

399663a7-0941-45a3-8952-28bbae54a5b6   XML

Metadata language

eng English

Character set

utf-8 UTF8

Hierarchy level

dataset Dataset

Date stamp

2021-10-22

Metadata standard name

ISDI Metadata Profile

Metadata standard version

1.2