Soils can do it all: not only do they sustain plant and animal life but they sustain us, too. The production of many different foods, feeds and plant raw materials is also founded on soils. They store and filter our groundwater, serve as grounds for constructions and as an archive of natural and cultural history.
Soils are a mix of mineral and organic substances and are constantly subject to change, either triggered naturally or by us humans. Depending on the parent material, climate, relief, soil fauna and flora, development period and our influence, different types of soil can be distinguished.
The first Berlin-wide Soil Map developed for the Environmental Atlas does not list individual soil types but categorises them into soil associations based on their parent material, soil-forming processes and use. The soil association 1010, for example, consists of para-brown soil and wedged sand-pit brown soil, which is mainly found on the Barnim and Teltow sandy boulder marl plateaus. Dive into the following pages and map to learn more about soil associations and how often and where exactly they occur in the city area.
The “Soil Associations” Map presents both near-natural and anthropogenic, i.e. man-made or influenced, soil associations. You may come across collective soil associations in East-Berlin and concept soil association dotted across the entire city: soil associations have been aggregated to form collective soil associations, where the data available is not detailed enough. Concept soil associations are characterised by a combination of use and geomorphology, which has not yet been confirmed by soil analysis.