The publication of this Handbook was supported by the Russian Federation

Sites for monitoring – land areas with definite boundaries, permanent in time and space, GIS- 
positioned and registered (certified). The number of  monitoring sites should be able to adequately 
represent the diversity of  soil, landscape, climatic, geomorphological, hydrological and lithological 
conditions and land use systems and to support mapping at different scales to evaluate the state of  
soils using their individual and combined characteristics.
The  development  of  observation  network. Practice of  European countries involves the 
use of  two types of  monitoring networks – regular and irregular. The regular network is used in 
Austria (a network of  several thousand permanent monitoring plots at a distance of  11 km and, 
some locations, 4 and 1 km from each other), Romania (960 plots in the intersections a 16x16 km 
network), France (2100 plots in the intersections of  a 16x16 km network) and Sweden (2400 plots 
in the intersections of  different-sized networks depending on topography). The irregular networks 
is used in Norway and Great Britain (13 plots each), Italy (27 plots), Germany (around 800 plots) 
and the Czech Republic (257 plots). This irregular type of  monitoring network makes it possible 
to give representative (proportional) estimates of  the state of  the soil cover structure and the local 
characteristics of  topography, climate and land use.
There are no comparative studies on the advantages and disadvantages of  the two above- described 
types of  monitoring networks. However, according to the EU standard (ISO 16133:2004(E)), it 
is recommended that each country individually chooses the type of  monitoring network to use 
depending on its own experience in monitoring studies.