Digital Mapping of Soil Organic Carbon with Machine Learning in Dryland of Northeast and North Plain China

Due to the importance of soil organic carbon (SOC) in supporting ecosystem services, accurate SOC assessment is vital for scientific research and decision making. However, most previous studies focused on single soil depth, leading to a poor understanding of SOC in multiple depths. To better understand the spatial distribution pattern of SOC in Northeast and North China Plain, we compared three machine learning algorithms (i.e., Cubist, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Random Forest (RF)) within the digital soil mapping framework. A total of 386 sampling sites (1584 samples) following specific criteria covering all dryland districts and counties and soil types in four depths (i.e., 0-10, 10-20, 20-30 and 30-40 cm) were collected in 2017. After feature selection from 249 environmental covariates by the Genetic Algorithm, 29 variables were used to fit models. The results showed SOC increased from southern to northern regions in the spatial scale and decreased with soil depths. From the result of independent verification (validation dataset: 80 sampling sites), RF (R-2: 0.58, 0.71, 0.73, 0.74 and RMSE: 3.49, 3.49, 2.95, 2.80 g kg(-1) in four depths) performed better than Cubist (R-2: 0.46, 0.63, 0.67, 0.71 and RMSE: 3.83, 3.60, 3.03, 2.72 g kg(-1)) and XGBoost (R-2: 0.53, 0.67, 0.70, 0.71 and RMSE: 3.60, 3.60, 3.00, 2.83 g kg(-1)) in terms of prediction accuracy and robustness. Soil, parent material and organism were the most important covariates in SOC prediction. This study provides the up-to-date spatial distribution of dryland SOC in Northeast and North China Plain, which is of great value for evaluating dynamics of soil quality after long-term cultivation.

Automated summary

This study provides the up-to-date spatial distribution map of soil organic carbon in drylands of Northeast and North China Plain using machine learning algorithms. The results showed that SOC increased from south to north and decreased with soil depths. Random Forest performed better in terms of prediction accuracy and robustness. Soil, parent material, and organism were identified as the most important variables in SOC prediction.