A biophysical typology for a spatially-explicit agri-environmental modelling framework

The Agri-Environmental Zonation (AEnZ) is a biophysical typology based on a recently available detailed database on organic carbon content of the topsoil of Europe, the Environmental Stratification (EnS) and an Agri-mask. The AEnZ is used within the integrated assessment framework of SEAMLESS. The basis for this typology is the Environmental Stratification of Europe (EnS) building mainly on climate and altitude characteristics. The 84 environmental strata were aggregated into 13 environmental zones (EnZs). The environmental zones were then combined with organic carbon topsoil data (OCTOP) to cover the wide range of agri-environmental diversity of Europe. The OCTOP content was selected as soil variable as it explained most of the variation in soils in Europe. The EnZs/OCTOP land units were combined with an Agri-mask representing major obstacles for farming resulting in the final AEnZ typology. The Agri-mask, which is based on CORINE Land Cover, soil, altitude and slope data, divides Europe into three zones with different agricultural potential (suited, unsuited and marginally suited). The AEnZ consists of 238 land types of which 82 classes are referred as suitable for agriculture (75.8% of EU27+). For the SEAMLESS framework two of the three dimensions of the Agri-Environmental Zonation have been used to build the spatial framework to link information on farming and biophysics. The spatial building block of SEAMLESS is thus the Seamzones, that is an overlay of the 13 environmental zones, the seven OCTOP classes and 270 administrative (NUTS2) regions. In total this results in 3,513 Seamzones that are used to structure the biophysical data as well as the data on farming across the EU27+.