Regional Pedological Reference of Limousin (RRP)

INRA and the Ministry responsible for Agriculture have launched a national programme “Inventory, Management and Conservation of Soils” (IGCS), a science-based soil management tool designed for operational purposes. It includes in particular the realisation of Regional Pedological References (RRP) compatible with a map restitution at the scale of 1/250 000. The main objective of RRPs is to meet the management and planning needs of local and regional authorities, professional organisations and administrations at departmental or regional levels. It was the agricultural chambers of Limousin (Corrèze, Creuse, Haute-Vienne) that carried out the study of the RRP and entered the data in the national database DONESOL. The RRP is not a map of soil types but a mapping of landscape units. They are called pedo-landscapes or Soil Cartographic Units (UCS). In fact, an inventory of soil types (soil typological units or UTS) is drawn up within each child-land landscape, specifying their relative percentage and how they are organised. Each UTS is described finely by a set of qualitative and quantitative variables contained in the strata. All this information is stored in the associated database (the Chambers of Agriculture are the managers of the database). To date, 333 CSUs and 503 STUs have been defined at regional level.