From KEITH BULL
The article ‘How Britain hides its acid soil’ (27 February) implies
a plot to hide data by British scientists and government alike. There are
two main charges. First, statistics were used to conceal areas of sensitive
soils on critical loads maps. Second, data submitted for European maps omit
these areas.
On the first point, the 10-kilometre summary map for soil critical
loads displays dominant critical loads values derived from the 1-kilometre
map data. This map was chosen by the scientists working on the maps to provide
a convenient scale for displaying the information and for comparing critical
loads with pollution data (since these are mapped at a similar scale). By
choosing the dominant critical load, the general pattern of critical loads
was retained on the map; we avoided overemphasis of the sensitive and non-sensitive
areas. While small areas of sensitivity may ‘disappear’ from some parts
of the map, larger areas of sensitivity ‘expand’ to occupy entire 10-kilometre
grid squares. The resulting national distribution of sensitive soils is
essentially the same for the 1-kilometre and 10-kilometre maps, differing
in relation to total area by only 2 per cent at most for each sensitivity
class.
On the second point I must stress that the full 1-kilometre data set
was used for making European maps. Contrary to what the article suggests,
these data have been presented and discussed at many UN/Economic Commission
for Europe meetings. No data have been hidden or withheld. So the European
map of critical loads (usually a 95 per cent protection map which overemphasises
sensitivity for the purposes of abatement strategy modelling) represents
Britain in exactly the same way as other countries.
Keith Bull Institute of Terrestial Ecology Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
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