Soil characteristics in Germany

Soils can be classified according to important and typical soil characteristics. Such a fundamental property is the composition of the soil or soil type. The soil type describes the size of the mineral particles from which a soil is built. The content of organic matter in the upper soil determines how much water or how much nutrients can be stored in the soil. The soil thickness describes the space under the earth's surface that can be rooted by plants. The theme maps of soil characteristics in Germany are based on the landuse stratified soil map of Germany 1:1,000,000 (BUEK1000N), more than 9000 quality-assured soil profiles of the federal states from a twenty-year period and on the land use dataset CORINE Landcover 2006 (UBA).