Some thoughts on the opportunities to expand the potential and improve the performance of digital soil mapping in Hungary

A wide range of disciplines and many national and international initiatives require spatially, and increasingly, spatiotemporally explicit information on soil properties, functions, processes and services at various scales. These emerging demands are mostly due to the recognition of the multifunctionality of soils. During the past decades a general demand for quantitative digital soil information for environmental modelling and management has compelled soil scientist to address many soil-related questions from a quantitative point of view. Digital soil mapping (DSM) together with pedometrics and proximal soil sensing will keep on playing crucial role in the forecasted near future referred as digital pedology as the upcoming era of the fundamental understanding of soil in space and time.

Hungarian soil spatial data infrastructure has recently been renewed within the DOSoReMI.hu initiative. Primary soil property maps compiled according to GlobalSoilMap.net specifications provide an operational and widely accepted source of information on soil at national level. Nevertheless, more recently new challenges have arisen from temporal, thematic and spatial point of view: higher resolution, up-to-date DSM products are expected, which describe soil features (properties, functions, processes) in more details, from various aspects. Our overall aim is to address these challenges by (i) developing approaches that extend and/or rethink the three pillars of DSM, (ii) linking DSM products of different scales and (iii) bridging potential gaps between them.

Based on the above background, it is both rational and socially beneficial to identify opportunities to expand the potential and improve the performance of DSM in the support of the multifaceted concept of soil security. Our objectives are twofold: (i) to continue developing and modernizing the national spatial soil data infrastructure capable of meeting the emerging needs for soil information for various purposes and at different scales, (ii) by addressing (at least some of) the ‘pedometrics ten challenges’, methodological issues that are currently at the forefront of soil research.

During our forecasted activity we are going to focus on some highlighted topics keeping the possibility to extend them by identifying new challenges and solutions:

• Introduction of spatially dense observations together with proper pedotransfer function development into DSM to increase thematic versatility and spatial resolution.
• Application of ancillary data originating from high-resolution (both spatial and spectral) imagery and geophysical sensors to support e.g. pedometric zoning of agricultural plots and increase prediction accuracy on flat areas.
• Introducing spatially distributed, physics-based models into digital mapping of specific soil functions and processes through pedological interpretation of spatiotemporal model outputs.
• Testing the impact of iterative mapping and ensemble modelling on prediction performance based on detailed and refined accuracy assessment.

According to our experiences, working on approaches to solve certain mapping challenges may easily conclude to newer methodological questions and/or ideas. With the present paper and the topics listed above, our aim is to stimulate DSM stakeholders (both users and producers) to identify and/or formulate new challenges and solutions, which might be worth for overthinking and/or solving within the spatial branch of the upcoming era of digital pedology.