Mapping high resolution National Soil Information Grids of China

Soil spatial information has traditionally been presented as polygon maps at coarse scales. Solving global and local issues, including food security, water regulation, land degradation, and climate change requires higher quality, more consistent and detailed soil information. Accurate prediction of soil variation over large and complex areas with limited samples remains a challenge, which is especially significant for China due to its vast land area which contains the most diverse soil landscapes in the world. Here, we integrated predictive soil mapping paradigm with adaptive depth function fitting, state-of-the-art ensemble machine learning and high-resolution soil-forming environment characterization in a highperformance parallel computing environment to generate 90-m resolution national gridded maps of nine soil properties (pH, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, cation exchange capacity, bulk density, coarse fragments, and thickness) at multiple depths across China. This was based on approximately 5000 representative soil profiles collected in a recent national soil survey and a suite of detailed covariates to characterize soil-forming environments. The predictive accuracy ranged from very good to moderate (Model Efficiency Coefficients from 0.71 to 0.36) at 0-5 cm. The predictive accuracy for most soil properties declined with depth. Compared with previous soil maps, we achieved significantly more detailed and accurate predictions which could well represent soil variations across the territory and are a significant contribution to the GlobalSoilMap.net project. The relative importance of soil-forming factors in the predictions varied by specific soil property and depth, suggesting the complexity and non-stationarity of comprehensive multi-factor interactions in the process of soil development. (c) 2021 Science China Press. Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science China Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

Traditionally, soil spatial information has been presented as coarse polygon maps. However, solving global and local issues requires higher quality and more detailed soil information. In this study, we integrated predictive soil mapping paradigms and high-performance computing to generate high-resolution national gridded maps of nine soil properties at multiple depths across China. The predictions achieved significantly more detailed and accurate results compared to previous soil maps, making it a significant contribution to the GlobalSoilMap.net project.