Digital soil mapping: Predicting soil classes distribution in large areas based on existing soil maps from similar small areas

Abstract

There is an ever-growing need for soil maps, since detailed soil information is directly related to agricultural activities, urbanization and environmental protection. However, there is a lack of large-scale soil maps in developing tropical countries such as Brazil. Albeit there are soil maps for small areas, large regions usually have undetailed maps. Considering the importance of finding low-cost alternatives to overcome the lack of detailed soil information, the main objective of this work was to manually create a local soil map and extrapolate it to similar larger areas that lack detailed soil information. The Anhumas River Basin, in the municipality of Itajubá, southeast Brazil, was manually mapped and this map was used to predict soils distribution for the entire municipality. First, the prediction model was tested in the same basin and provided sufficient results, achieving 67% global accuracy and 0.62 Kappa coefficient. Second, the resulting map was used together with the soil map of the larger José Pereira Basin to map the entire municipality, achieving 54% global accuracy and 0.40 Kappa coefficient. Low resolution parent material information was found to confuse models; maps showed better results when this variable was removed. The Minas Gerais soil map presents general mapping units only for the Acrisol class and its associations with other soil classes in the area. The soil map predicted by this work identified more soil classes. Mapping representative areas and extrapolating these maps to larger similar areas constitute a promising alternative to overcome the lack of detailed soil maps.