Urban soil desealing

The research project DESSERT (Desealing of soils, ecosystem services and territory resilience – 2020-2024) supported by the French Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe) aims to inventory practices of soil desealing, and to acquire scientific knowledge on desealed soils to provide tools to help urban stakeholders to design and implement soil desealing practices. Within this project, the present work aims at improving our knowledge on current desealing practices in urban environments. To do so, information on soil desealing operations was collected using an online survey and direct interaction with urban operators. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analysed to draw a first picture of soil desealing practices. Two complementary strategies were carried out to compile data on desealing operations. (1) Online questionnaire run over a period of 4 months (June 7th to September 17th, 2021). Email reminders were made during the questionnaire's accessibility period. The questionnaire included sixty questions, mostly semi-open question (multiple choice with single or multiple answers) or text question. Due to the structure of the questionnaire, each question is independent from the others. (2) Case studies of soil desealing were collected through direct interaction with consulting firms, partners of the DESSERT project. The desealing projects described were added to the feedbacks collected from the online questionnaire.