Soil Property and Class Maps of the Conterminous US at 100 meter Spatial Resolution based on a Compilation of National Soil Point Observations and Machine Learning

TL;DR

This study developed high-resolution soil property and class maps for the US using machine learning on combined soil datasets and environmental data, enabling better spatial soil resource management.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel high-resolution soil mapping approach using machine learning, integrating multiple datasets for comprehensive soil property and class predictions across the US.

Findings

Achieved 60-66% accuracy in soil class predictions.

Predicted soil properties with R-squared values up to 87%.

Created detailed 100m resolution soil maps for the US.

Abstract

With growing concern for the depletion of soil resources, conventional soil data must be updated to support spatially explicit human-landscape models. Three US soil point datasetswere combined with a stack of over 200 environmental datasets to generate complete coverage gridded predictions at 100 m spatial resolution of soil properties (percent organic C, total N, bulk density, pH, and percent sand and clay) and US soil taxonomic classes (291 great groups and 78 modified particle size classes) for the conterminous US. Models were built using parallelized random forest and gradient boosting algorithms. Soil property predictions were generated at seven standard soil depths (0, 5, 15, 30, 60, 100 and 200 cm). Prediction probability maps for US soil taxonomic classifications were also generated. Model validation results indicate an out-of-bag classification accuracy of 60 percent for great groups, and 66 percent for modified particle size classes; for soil properties cross-validated R-square ranged from 62 percent for total N to 87 percent for pH. Nine independent validation datasets were used to assess prediction accuracies for soil class models and results ranged between 24-58 percent and 24-93 percent for great group and modified particle size class prediction accuracies, respectively. The hybrid "SoilGrids+" modeling system that incorporates remote sensing data, local predictions of soil properties, conventional soil polygon maps, and machine learning opens the possibility for updating conventional soil survey data with machine learning technology to make soil information easier to integrate with spatially explicit models, compared to multi-component map units.