From Profile Morphometries to Digital Soil Mapping

摘要

Soil observation ranges from point observations to spatial evaluation. We can study the clay content at a point or evaluate its distribution across space. Digital morphometries starts with a vision on the soil profile, to extract information from 'inside soils body' and make a diagnostic of its formation history and characters. On the other hand, soil develops as part of the landscape, which presents a continuous vision. Thus, the task is to extrapolate the pedon observation to space, taking us to asoil map, which is the basis for many applications in environmental and agricultural science. This chapter first demonstrates several practical information capture of soil profiles from its visible, near-, and mid-infrared reflectance. This instance tries to answer questions: How can spectroscopy differentiate soil profiles? How can it assist in soil classification? From this, we explore digital soil mapping with several examples. Strategies on soil mapping using pedotechnologies are discussed and exemplified with studies from a simple to complex geology. Finally, we discuss the perspectives of these techniques for getting a full description of soil distribution in the landscape.