Conclusions

Cover beds form a rather uniform veil of most slopes in Central Europe and, most likely, all over the mid-latitudes. Accordingly, their properties are of utmost importance for the formation of soils, for slope hydrology, and for slope dynamics. More research is, however, needed, as there is still insufficient information on the properties of cover-bed successions reaching deeper than 1 m, and there are still many areas where cover beds have not yet been studied at all. The potential use of cover beds for paleoenvironmental reconstructions is also still limited by the unsatisfactory techniques that are currently available for their numerical dating. Furthermore, better techniques for modeling the distribution and the properties of cover beds are required to forecast their influence on flooding events.