DSi – General Plans of Construction – expropriation plan, sub-areas

The annual soil sealing map (YearBAK) for Flanders at 5 m resolution is an aggregated version of the original 1 m version of the JaarBAK. It gives the hedging ratio for every 5 m cell and is available annually from 2013. For this last available year, this is a provisional version without continuity correction. This correction rectifies deviations over time, but can only be applied if the Annual BAK of the following year also exists. Once this is the case, this provisional version will be replaced by the final version. In the meantime, the provisional version can already be used for analyses, although with the necessary caution. The White Paper defines ‘floor cover’ as the area whose nature and/or condition of the soil surface has been altered by the application of artificial, (semi-) impermeable materials, thereby losing essential ecosystem functions of the soil (housing, roads, other structures...). This definition is based on the one used by the European Commission for ‘soil sealing’: the destruction or covering of soils by buildings, constructions and layers of completely or partly impermeable artificial material (asphalt, concrete, etc.). It is the most intense form of land take and is essentially an irreversible process. For this map, soil cover is first predicted by a machine learning model based on the mid-scale winter aerial shots of Flanders. This modeled soil cover is then combined with vector information about water, buildings, roads and railways from the Large-scale Reference File. For more details on the method used for drawing up the JaarBAK, see the technical report ‘Annual soil sealing map Flanders’ at https://archief.onderzoek.omgeving.vlaanderen.be/Onderzoek-3331558.