Federal statistical office data

In addition to the IMCC layers, soil sealing was also determined using the freely available area-use statistics of the Federal Statistical Office, both Germany-wide and with regional databases (Federal and State Statistical Offices, 2023c; Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), 2023). It is estimated that the majority of the disappeared agricultural land has been converted to predominantly sealed housing and transportation sector, and only a negligible amount has been restored. Therefore, the comparison in this study focuses on the official statistics data on the loss of agricultural soil.

The data of the German Main Land-use Survey (Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), 2022a) is used to determine the overall loss and therefore the approximate soil sealing of agricultural soils in Germany. To compare IMCC data with official statistics of Lower Saxony and Brandenburg, the changes in area by type of actual use between 2004 and 2015 are used to approximate the soil sealing on agricultural soils between 2006 and 2015, since only data from 2004 and subsequently 2008 are available (Federal and State Statistical Offices, 2023c). Due to size changes of administrative boundaries 2012/2013 in Brandenburg, areas are calculated separately from 2004 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2015. The year in between was interpolated.

For these two local test areas OLD and BER official statistics of the respective municipalities are used from the earliest available year 2008 to 2015 (Federal and State Statistical Offices, 2023c). The changes in loss of agricultural soils are area-weighted depending on the municipalities share in these two grid cells and subsequently added up to approximate the overall sealing rate for both 20,000 ha areas.