Hyper-temporal remote sensing for digital soil mapping: Characterizing soil-vegetation response to climatic variability

Indices derived from remotely-sensed imagery are commonly used to predict soil properties with digital soil mapping (DSM) techniques. The use of images from single dates or a small number of dates is most common for DSM; however, selection of the appropriate images is complicated by temporal variability in land surface spectral properties. We argue that hyper-temporal remote sensing (RS) (i.e., hundreds of images) can provide novel insights into soil spatial variability by quantifying the temporal response of land surface spectral properties. This temporal response provides a spectral 'fingerprint' of the soil-vegetation relationship which is directly related to a range of soil properties. To evaluate the hyper-temporal RS approach, this study first reviewed and synthesized, within the context of temporal variability, previous research that has used RS imagery for DSM. Results from this analysis support the notion that temporal variability in RS spectra, as driven by soil and climate feedbacks, is an important predictor of soil variability. To explicitly evaluate this idea and to demonstrate the utility of the hyper-temporal approach, we present a case study in a semiarid landscape of southeastern Arizona, USA. In this case study surface soil texture and coarse fragment classes were predicted using a 28 year time series of Landsat TM derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and modeled using support vector machine (SVM) classification, and results evaluated relative to more traditional RS approaches (e.g., mono-, bi-, and multi-temporal). Results from the case study show that SVM classification using hyper-temporal RS imagery was more effective in modeling both soil texture and coarse fragment classes relative to mono-, bi-, or multi-temporal RS, with classification accuracies of 67% and 62%, respectively. Short-term transitions between wet and dry periods (i.e., <6 months) were the dominant drivers of vegetation spectral variability and corresponded to the general timing of significant RS scenes within in our SVM models, confirming the importance of spectral variability in predicting soil texture and coarse fragment classes. Results from the case study demonstrate the efficacy of the hyper-temporal RS approach in predicting soil properties and highlights how hyper-temporal RS can improve current methods of soil mapping efforts through its ability to characterize subtle changes in RS spectra relating to variation in soil properties. Published by Elsevier B.V.