Interaction of soil information system and remote sensing for identification of land use in relevant soil mapping units

For practical purposes, ancillary information is often required from users to pedological cartography. In fact, once the relevant soil mapping units of interest are defined and selected, the user wants to know either the prevalent land useAand cover classes or their association within each soil mapping unit. These data are frequently used for environmental monitoring programs and for assessment and evaluation of the agronomical productivity of soils. Currently the answer to this need coincides with a consistently time consunling, and it requires the selection of several point of observations correspondent to each mapping unit, and eventually to the pedological delineation, and the surveys and mapping of the in field ground truth of the land uselland cover. ERSAL, and CNR have recently developed separately two geographical information systems for soi1 applications in Italy and the assessment of the impact of the agroteclmologies on the environment: the Lombardia Soils Information System (LOSIS), and the Integrated Geographical Information System (IGIS). In the LOSIS information concerning the relevant soil mapping units derived from in field observations and surveys is collected and mapped, while IGIS is bnsed essentially on georefened satellite remote sensing images, their supervised classification, cartographic and thematic maps, and some in field surveys. In this paper the fusion of the two systems is described with the production of syntlletic final maps at the scale of 1:250,000 compatible with the period and season of observation, with informative