Within the field of Soil Science, Remote Sensing has a wide range of applications at various scales. In this session we will focus on soil mapping and soil property prediction beyond the plot scale.

Research has shown that remote sensing provides data (1) supporting the segmentation of the landscape into rather homogeneous soil-landscape units whose soil composition can be determined by sampling or that can serve as a source of secondary information, (2) allowing measurement or prediction of soil properties by means of physically-based and empirical methods, and (3) supporting spatial interpolation of sparsely sampled soil property data as a primary or secondary data source.

However, so far most methods for spatial prediction of soil properties have only proven to work under laboratory conditions or on plot scale. The next step would be to see how these methods can be extended to larger extents. This will require integration of different products and methods. The ability to apply remote sensing methods and improve coherence in soil and terrain mapping at various scales, is expected to be of great benefit to the soil science community. Therefore, in this session we aim to bring together scientists working on state of the art research related to using the full range of remote sensing techniques available for soil science. Within the Soil System Sciences programme group we will communicate recent advances in this field to the soil science community.
Suggested topics are:
• Soil sampling strategies supported by remote sensing
• Proximal Soil Sensing and Remote Sensing for soil mapping
• Soil property mapping using remote sensing derived proxies
• Soil property mapping beyond plot scale
• Combined use of remote sensing products for soil property prediction
• Soil classification with use of remote sensing