Digital soil mapping: novel approaches and sensing techniques to the prediction of key soil properties.

Within the field of Soil Science, digital soil mapping has a wide range of applications at various scales. As we consider more complex models, applied to larger geographical regions, the demand for information on key parameters and input variables becomes harder to meet. In this session we will address the current state of the art in digital soil mapping, addressing problems such as the development of spatial and non-spatial soil inference systems and the quantitative treatment of the inevitable uncertainty in our predictions. There is particular interest in the use of proximal and remote sensing technologies as a basis for prediction of soil properties, and therefore an important problem is how to extract information at appropriate spatial scale from multiple sources of data. Remote sensing provides extensive auxiliary data for soil property prediction by digital soil mapping. Therefore, 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. So far, most sensing methods for spatial prediction of soil properties have only proven to work under laboratory conditions or on plot scale, but there is great interest to studies applied to larger geographical regions. As such, the next step would be to see how these methods can be extended to larger extents, which will require integration of different products and methods.

In this session we aim to bring together scientists working on research related to using the full range of digital soil mapping and soil 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 and we aim to identify priorities to make operational use of the methods for mapping of key soil properties at larger geographical regions.