Soil Monitor: an internet platform to challenge soil sealing in Italy

This work proposes a new type of web-based geospatial decision support system—called Soil Monitor—which provides a multidisciplinary operational tool useful for a multi-stakeholder community to challenge soil sealing. Various technological and technical features of Soil Monitor are presented and discussed with particular reference to the combination of WebGIS with on-the-fly geospatial processing based on GPU computing, specifically designed to allow real-time requests. In addition, we present three quantitative analysis of soil sealing at three different scales. The study at national level illustrated that the type of land use strongly affected soil-sealing dynamics. Indeed, the class complex cultivation pattern resulted the most fragile land use while forests resulted the most resilient one. The study at province level illustrated the key importance of having on-the-fly the map of rural fragmentation for any Italian province. This map—quantifying the landscape integrity of the rural and natural areas—enables to better locate both new green corridors or new urban developments minimizing the environmental impact of human activities. The study at municipality level demonstrated the importance of quantifying a pool of spatial planning indicators and illustrated that (a) the largest urban dispersion occurs in hilly touristic municipalities close to the sea, (b) the increase in soil sealing in rural sites is not related to population growth. As a result, Soil Monitor is deemed useful both to support decision making at different spatial scales and to raise awareness in people, professionals, and experts of other fields. Keywords soil sealing, geospatial decision support system, compute unified device architecture, graphical processing unit computing, urban planning.