Assessment of Soil Suitability Using Machine Learning in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions

Increasing agricultural production is a major concern that aims to increase income, reduce hunger, and improve other measures of well-being. Recently, the prediction of soil-suitability has become a primary topic of rising concern among academics, policymakers, and socio-economic analysts to assess dynamics of the agricultural production. This work aims to use physico-chemical and remotely sensed phenological parameters to produce soil-suitability maps (SSM) based on Machine Learning (ML) Algorithms in a semi-arid and arid region. Towards this goal an inventory of 238 suitability points has been carried out in addition to14 physico-chemical and 4 phenological parameters that have been used as inputs of machine-learning approaches which are five MLA prediction, namely RF, XgbTree, ANN, KNN and SVM. The results showed that phenological parameters were found to be the most influential in soil-suitability prediction. The validation of the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve approach indicates an area under the curve and an AUC of more than 0.82 for all models. The best results were obtained using the XgbTree with an AUC = 0.97 in comparison to other MLA. Our findings demonstrate an excellent ability for ML models to predict the soil-suitability using physico-chemical and phenological parameters. The approach developed to map the soil-suitability is a valuable tool for sustainable agricultural development, and it can play an effective role in ensuring food security and conducting a land agriculture assessment.

Automated summary

This study developed soil-suitability maps using machine learning algorithms and physico-chemical and phenological parameters, showing that phenological parameters had the greatest influence on soil-suitability prediction. The Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve validation demonstrated high accuracy for all models, with an AUC above 0.82, and the XgbTree model achieved the best performance with an AUC of 0.97. The findings highlight the excellent ability of machine learning models to predict soil-suitability.