Mapping soil organic matter in cultivated land based on multi-year composite images on monthly time scales

Rapid and accurate acquisition of soil organic matter(SOM)information in cultivated land is important for sustainable agricultural development and carbon balance management.This study proposed a novel approach to predict SOM with high accuracy using multiyear synthetic remote sensing variables on a monthly scale.We obtained 12 monthly synthetic Sentinel-2 images covering the study area from 2016 to 2021 through the Google Earth Engine(GEE)platform,and reflectance bands and vegetation indices were extracted from these composite images.Then the random forest(RF),support vector machine(SVM)and gradient boosting regression tree(GBRT)models were tested to investigate the difference in SOM prediction accuracy under different combinations of monthly synthetic variables.Results showed that firstly,all monthly synthetic spectral bands of Sentinel-2 showed a significant correlation with SOM(P<0.05)for the months of January,March,April,October,and November.Secondly,in terms of single-monthly composite variables,the prediction accuracy was relatively poor,with the highest R^(2)value of 0.36 being observed in January.When monthly synthetic environmental variables were grouped in accordance with the four quarters of the year,the first quarter and the fourth quarter showed good performance,and any combination of three quarters was similar in estimation accuracy.The overall best performance was observed when all monthly synthetic variables were incorporated into the models.Thirdly,among the three models compared,the RF model was consistently more accurate than the SVM and GBRT models,achieving an R^(2)value of 0.56.Except for band 12 in December,the importance of the remaining bands did not exhibit significant differences.This research offers a new attempt to map SOM with high accuracy and fine spatial resolution based on monthly synthetic Sentinel-2 images.

Incorporation of source contributions to improve the accuracy of soil heavy metal mapping using small sample sizes at a county scale

Estimating heavy metal(HM) distribution with high precision is the key to effectively preventing Chinese medicinal plants from being polluted by the native soil. A total of 44 surface soil samples were gathered to detect the concentrations of eight HMs(As, Hg, Cu, Cr, Ni, Zn, Pb, and Cd) in the herb growing area of Luanping County, northeastern Hebei Province, China. An absolute principal component score-multiple linear regression(APCS-MLR) model was used to quantify pollution source contributions to soil HMs. Furthermore, the source contribution rates and environmental data of each sampling point were simultaneously incorporated into a stepwise linear regression model to identify the crucial indicators for predicting soil HM spatial distributions. Results showed that 88% of Cu, 72% of Cr, and 72% of Ni came from natural sources;50% of Zn, 49% of Pb, and 59% of Cd were mainly caused by agricultural activities;and 44% of As and 56% of Hg originated from industrial activities. When three-type(natural, agricultural, and industrial) source contribution rates and environmental data were simultaneously incorporated into the stepwise linear regression model, the fitting accuracy was significantly improved and the model could explain 31%–86% of the total variance in soil HM concentrations. This study introduced three-type source contributions of each sampling point based on APCS-MLR analysis as new covariates to improve soil HM estimation precision, thus providing a new approach for predicting the spatial distribution of HMs using small sample sizes at the county scale.