Soil polygon disaggregation through similarity-based prediction with legacy pedons

Conventional soil maps generally contain one or more soil types within a single soil polygon.But their geographic locations within the polygon are not specified.This restricts current applications of the maps in site-specific agricultural management and environmental modelling.We examined the utility of legacy pedon data for disaggregating soil polygons and the effectiveness of similarity-based prediction for making use of the under-or over-sampled legacy pedon data for the disaggregation.The method consisted of three steps.First,environmental similarities between the pedon sites and each location were computed based on soil formative environmental factors.Second,according to soil types of the pedon sites,the similarities were aggregated to derive similarity distribution for each soil type.Third,a hardening process was performed on the maps to allocate candidate soil types within the polygons.The study was conducted at the soil subgroup level in a semi-arid area situated in Manitoba,Canada.Based on 186 independent pedon sites,the evaluation of the disaggregated map of soil subgroups showed an overall accuracy of 67% and a Kappa statistic of 0.62.The map represented a better spatial pattern of soil subgroups in both detail and accuracy compared to a dominant soil subgroup map,which was commonly used in practice.Incorrect predictions mainly occurred in the agricultural plain area and the soil subgroups that are very similar in taxonomy,indicating that new environmental covariates need to be developed.We concluded that the combination of legacy pedon data with similarity-based prediction is an effective solution for soil polygon disaggregation.

Mapping high resolution National Soil Information Grids of China

Soil spatial information has traditionally been presented as polygon maps at coarse scales. Solving global and local issues, including food security, water regulation, land degradation, and climate change requires higher quality, more consistent and detailed soil information. Accurate prediction of soil variation over large and complex areas with limited samples remains a challenge, which is especially significant for China due to its vast land area which contains the most diverse soil landscapes in the world. Here, we integrated predictive soil mapping paradigm with adaptive depth function fitting, state-of-the-art ensemble machine learning and high-resolution soil-forming environment characterization in a highperformance parallel computing environment to generate 90-m resolution national gridded maps of nine soil properties(pH, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, cation exchange capacity, bulk density, coarse fragments, and thickness) at multiple depths across China. This was based on approximately5000 representative soil profiles collected in a recent national soil survey and a suite of detailed covariates to characterize soil-forming environments. The predictive accuracy ranged from very good to moderate(Model Efficiency Coefficients from 0.71 to 0.36) at 0–5 cm. The predictive accuracy for most soil properties declined with depth. Compared with previous soil maps, we achieved significantly more detailed and accurate predictions which could well represent soil variations across the territory and are a significant contribution to the GlobalSoilMap.net project. The relative importance of soil-forming factors in the predictions varied by specific soil property and depth, suggesting the complexity and non-stationarity of comprehensive multi-factor interactions in the process of soil development.

Mapping soil erodibility in southeast China at 250 m resolution:Using environmental variables and random forest regression with limited samples

Soil erodibility(K factor)mapping has been accomplished mainly by soil map-linked or geo-statistical interpolation.However,the resulting maps usually have coarse spatial resolution at a regional scale.The objectives of this study were a)to map the K factors using a set of environmental variables and random forest(RF)model,and b)to identify the important environmental variables in the predictive mapping on a regional scale.We collected 101 surface soil samples across southeast China in the summer of 2019.For each sample,we measured the particle size distribution and organic matter content,and calculated the K factors using the nomograph equation.The hyperparameters of RF were optimized through 5-fold cross validation(m_(ay)=2,n_(tree)=500,p=63),and a digital map with 250 m resolution was generated for the K factor.The lower and upper limits of a 90% prediction interval were also pro-duced for uncertainty analysis.It was found that the important environmental variables for the K factor prediction were relief,climate,land surface temperature and vegetation indexes.Since the existing K factor map has an average polygonal area of 6.8 km^(2),our approach dramatically improves the spatial resolution of the K factor to 0.0625 km^(2).The new method captures more distinct differences in spatial details,and the spatial distribution of the K factor derived from RF prediction followed a similar pattern with kriging interpolation.This suggests the presented approach in this study is effective for mapping the K factor with limited sampling data.