Soil property mapping by combining spatial distance information into the Soil Land Inference Model (SoLIM)

Abstract

The Soil Land Inference Model (SoLIM) was primarily proposed by Zhu et al. (Zhu A X, Band L, Vertessy R, Dutton B. 1997. Derivation of soil properties using a soil land inference model (SoLIM). Soil Sci Soc Am J.61: 523–533.) and was based on the Third Law of Geography. Based on the assumption that the soil property value at a location of interest will be more similar to that of a given soil sample when the environmental condition at the location of interest is more similar to that at the location from which the sample was taken, SoLIM estimates the soil property value of the location of interest using the soil property values of known samples weighted by the similarity between those samples and the location of interest in terms of an attribute domain of environmental conditions. However, the current SoLIM method ignores information about the spatial distances between the location of interest and those of the sample. In this study, we proposed a new method of soil property mapping, SoLIM-IDW, which incorporates spatial distance information into the SoLIM method by means of inverse distance weighting (IDW). The proposed method is based on the assumption that the soil property value at a location of interest will be more similar to that of a known sample both when the environmental conditions are more similar and when the distance between the location of interest and the sample location is shorter. Our evaluation experiments on A-horizon soil organic matter mapping in two study areas with independent evaluation samples showed that the proposed SoLIM-IDW method can obtain lower prediction errors than the original SoLIM method, multiple linear regression, geographically weighted regression, and regression-kriging with the same modeling points. Future work mainly includes the determination of optimal power parameter values and the appropriate setting of the parameter under different application contexts.