No label defined (Q4372467)

Over the last years it has become apparent that soil is a limited resource that is nonrenewable at human time scales. This resource is consumed at an increasing rate, often irreversibly, by building, compaction, erosion, and by biological and chemical degradation. In addition the use of soil in intensive farming frequently leads to the contamination of other ecocomponents such as air or ground and surface water. The following three chapters provide an overview of three different fields that are relevant for the work presented here. Chapter 2 introduces fuzzy set theory and defines the semantics of fuzzy logic formulae; Chapter 3 discusses the handling of spatial data, especially in the context of geographic information systems; and Chapter 4 provides some information on soil description, soil classification, and soil survey. Chapter 5 presents the system that implements the modelling approach. Three models are defined: a landscape model, a soil-landscape model, and a soil model. Further, interaction with the system is described and the system is discussed from the soil-science point of view. The following chapters present some aspects of the system in more detail. Chapter 6 discusses the `fuzzy profiles' that are used for the representation of soil information, and Chapter 7 investigates various aspects of the fuzzy rules that represent the soil-landscape model. Chapter 8 shows several ways of visualizing a three-dimensional continuous soil model, and Chapter 9 gives an extended example of the application of the modeling system to a farm in Eastern Holstein.