Soil Map of the European Communities (CORINE)

The Soil Map of the European Communities was digitized by June 1986 from the original map at a scale of one to 1 000 000. There were two layers of the map which were integrated for the CORINE Project (Coordination of Information on the Environment) by Birkbeck College of the University of London, automatically scanned soil boundaries and manually digitized coastlines and rivers, which also formed soil boundaries. These could only be integrated after what were originally different projections had been discovered and corrected, and the soil boundaries were fitted to the standard CORINE coastline by a combination of automatic and manual techniques. These modifications are thought to represent significant improvements of the original Soil Map in terms of geographic fidelity. The total number of soil classes in the data set is nearly 350.