Currently, soil spatial information is critical for the management of natural resources, prevention of risks and land use planning. In recent years, soil mapping has developed enormously through the use of new technologies such as GIS, remote sensing and the use of new tools. This session will address the current state of the art in soil mapping, focusing on the development of digital soil mapping, soil modelling, digital soil databases, land resource evaluation and the relationship between research and decision-making by management organisms or its application to environmental assessment. Studies on soil evaluation and surveys at different scales, soil quality indices, the relationship between soils and geomorphology, soil hydrology and research on the risks of physical and chemical degradation of soil, as well as new approaches to inventory and spatial distribution of soils and their properties are welcome. Studies on soil evaluation and surveys at different scales, soil quality indices, the relationship between soils and geomorphology, soil hydrology and research on the risks of physical and chemical degradation of soil, as well as new approaches to inventory and spatial distribution of soils and their properties are welcome.
But soil properties are "dynamic" and evolve in space and time. This spatial and temporal variability depends upon factors such as the geological and geomorphological characteristics, climate, vegetation cover and the degree of human impact. Often, for a better understanding of soil characteristics spatio-temporal evolution models (geostatistical and others) are used to predict soil properties. Models are a helpful tool to understand the soil spatio-temporal evolution and give a comprehensive view. However, depending on the model used the spatio-temporal predictions could be significantly different, using the same database. Therefore it is important to identify the best predictor and minimize the errors in order to select the best fitted model. Since models are widely used to estimate a large range of soil properties (e.g heavy metals, erosion) they have important impacts in soil management (e.g. remediation, fertilization, erosion mitigation) and related decision making. Therefore it is of fundamental importance to find accurate and validated models. So, this session will also be focused on the problematic of model validation and improvement in order to have better estimations. Communications about soil properties modeling and validation from all scales are very welcome.
Solicited participants: Nancy Alanís González, Miriam Muñoz-Rojas