Incorporation of multi-scale spatial autocorrelation in soil moisture-landscape modeling

Effects of spatial autocorrelation (SAC), or spatial structure, have often been neglected in the conventional models of pedogeomorphological processes. Based on soil, vegetation, and topographic data collected in a coastal dunefield in western Korea, this research developed three soil moisture-landscape models, each incorporating SAC at fine, broad, and multiple scales, respectively, into a non-spatial ordinary least squares (OLS) model. All of these spatially explicit models showed better performance than the OLS model, as consistently indicated by R-2, Akaike's information criterion, and Moran's I. In particular, the best model was proved to be the one using spatial eigenvector mapping, a technique that accounts for spatial structure at multiple scales simultaneously. After including SAC, predictor variables with greater inherent spatial structure underwent more reduction in their predictive power than those with less structure. This finding implies that the environmental variables pedogeomorphologists have perceived important in the conventional regression modeling may have a reduced predictive power in reality, in cases where they possess a significant amount of SAC. This research demonstrates that accounting for spatial structure not only helps to avoid the violation of statistical assumptions, but also allows a better understanding of dynamic soil hydrological processes occurring at different spatial scales.