The rational management of land resources represents one of the most important and challenging policy issues in the European Community. lt is an issue which is relevant at both the national and international level. lt is an issue, also, which cuts across many different policy interests - environment, agriculture, rural and regional development - each of which both influences and is affected by the nature and problem of land resources. lt is an issue of which the importance has been stressed on a number of occasions by the European Parliament. Given the increasing threat to land resources and especially the growing problem of soil erosion in Mediterranean regions, an urgent need thus exists to provide information which can help to target policy actions to the areas of greatest need. In accordance with the Decision of the Council of Ministers setting up the CORINE programme, the aims of this project were thus to contribute to this objective by: Collecting and collating data referring to land quality and soil erosion risk in southern Community Member States; integrating these data into a consistent and coherent information system which will allow the analysis and mapping of land quality and soil erosion risk at a scale suitable for policy applications; developing methods for the assessment of land quality and soil erosion risk which can be used with these data; producing preliminary maps of land quality and soil erosion risk, on the basis of these methods, which can both illustrate the potential of the information system, and provide information for immediate policy use; evaluating the methods used, and the results obtained, to indicate future research needs and ways in which the current work may be developed, extended and improved.