FOREGS-EuroGeoSurveys Geochemical Baseline Database: Instructions

Timo Tarvainen
Geological Survey of Finland, P.O. Box 96, FIN-02151 ESPOO, Finland

The EuroGeoSurveys - FOREGS Geochemical Baseline Database is part of the electronic publication version of

Salminen, R. (Chief-editor), Batista, M. J., Bidovec, M., Demetriades, A., De Vivo, B., De Vos, W., Duris, M., Gilucis, A., Gregorauskiene, V., Halamic, J., Heitzmann, P., Lima, A., Jordan, G., Klaver, G., Klein, P., Lis, J., Locutura, J., Marsina, K., Mazreku, A., O'Connor, P. J., Olsson, S.Å., Ottesen, R.-T., Petersell, V., Plant, J.A., Reeder, S., Salpeteur, I., Sandström, H., Siewers, U., Steenfelt, A., Tarvainen, T., 2005. Geochemical Atlas of Europe. Part 1: Background Information, Methodology and Maps. Espoo, Geological Survey of Finland, 526 pages, 36 figures, 362 maps,

which can be downloaded from the WWW pages of the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK).

Please quote the above reference or the electronic version http://www.gtk.fi/publ/foregsatlas/ when using or reproducing any of the data. Any published data from the Geochemical Atlas of Europe should also be marked with the Geochemical Atlas of Europe; copyright © 2005 the Association of the Geological Surveys of The European Union (EuroGeoSurveys)/ the Geological Survey of Finland.

This WWW site contains the raw analytical data in Excel files. Each analytical method has a separate file for every solid sample material except stream water. All stream water results are included in a single file. All records include the GTN sample identifier, coordinates in decimal degrees (East coordinates are positive and West coordinates negative, so -14.36 mean 14.36 degrees West), in some cases there is the preprocessing code, country code of the field data, analytical results and another country code for analytical data. The three topmost header lines show the element names, units and the detection limits. The coordinates are designed to be used at the scale of the European continent (Albers Equal Area Conic projection, with the following projection settings: Scale = 1; False Easting(m) = 5000000; False Northing(m) = 0; Longitude Origin = 20; Latitude Origin = 0; Standard Parallel 1 = 45; Standard Parallel 2 = 55, and the Ellipsoid is WGS 84). If the data are used at the local scale, the user is encouraged to contact the national partner of the former FOREGS and presently EuroGeoSurveys 'Geochemistry Working Group' to obtain more precise information on the sampling locations.

Missing values are marked with value -1.0 in most cases. Values below the detection limit (DL) are changed to half the detection limit value (DL/2). Example: In topsoil XRF data, the detection limit for arsenic (As) is 2 mg kg-1; therefore, all values which were marked as <2 mg kg-1 in the original file are transformed to the value 1.00. In the stream water data set there was more than one detection limit for anions. All anion concentrations below a detection limit were converted to half the value of the most common detection limit for an anion. In some cases there was more than one detection limit also for cations. For cations: all values below any DL have been converted to half the detection limit value (DL/2).

Disclaimer

Download data (ZIP files)

Subsoil (465 KB)

Topsoil (500 KB)

Humus (50 KB)

Stream Water (240 KB)

Stream Sediment (315 KB)

Floodplain Sediment (275 KB)

Comments:

21 June 2006: Cu, Pb, Zn of stream water sample taken by the Swiss team are not included in the deliverable data set because of possible contamination of samples.

1 December 2006: New data files for stream water and stream sediments. Coordinates corrected for samples N34E01S2 (France, stream sediment) and N23E01W2 (France, water).

7 August 2007: New data files for humus and floodplain sediment. Coordinates corrected for samples N26E09F2, N32W02F5 and N44E09H5.

17 September 2007: Iodide data of water samples were removed from the data set. The anomalous area in Eastern Germany could be repeated in dupliacte samples
and repliacte analysis in 1999 but not in the analysis of totally new samples in 2007.