Soil sealing in the Free State of Saxony

The Saxon State Office for the Environment, Agriculture and Geology has developed a method for recording the average degree of sealing for the entire land area from existing data sets. Simultaneous land use information from the ATKIS basic DLM and digital aerial photographs (DOP) of the Saxon State Office for Basic Geoinformation are used. The mean soil sealing degree for each land use category is derived and assigned to the respective legend units of the ATKIS base DLM. The initial recording of the mean degree of soil sealing was based on the ATKIS data for 2018. The second collection was carried out with the 2021 ATKIS data. For the use of the information in the different planning areas, the information is provided in a layer with the cell size 100 × 100 meters. Each cell carries the mean degree of sealing of the soil as area information. In addition, the mean degree of sealing was classified into 6 different classes of the degree of sealing. The information will be updated successively in the coming years and new knowledge will be incorporated. The current data state corresponds to the collection with ATKIS data state from 2021.