Predictive soil mapping in the Boreal Plains of Northern Alberta by using multi-temporal remote sensing data and terrain derivatives

Abstract

As Canada's vast Boreal Plains are extensively managed, predictive soil mapping could be used as an effective tool to generate high-resolution soil information for the region to inform sustainable resource management. This study aimed to investigate the use of multi-temporal remote sensing data and terrain derivatives to map soil types in the region. A method of constraining subgroup and great-group soil-type predictions based on the predictions at higher-order levels (great-group and order, respectively) was tested. Sentinel time series median values obtained by using Google Earth Engine were tested in combination with first- and second-order digital elevation model derivatives for use as predictor variables in the predictive models. A recursive feature selection process was implemented to reduce the number of predictor variables used in model training. Soil classes were predicted at the order, great-group, and subgroup levels and two approaches were tested. In the first approach, models were unconstrained based on previous predictions. In the second approach, models were constrained to predict only soil great-group classes that occur within the predicted soil order for a given location and similarly predict only soil subgroup classes that occur within the predicted soil great group for a given location. Determined through independent validation testing, the most probable predicted soil maps had overall accuracies ranging from 42% to 68% and kappa scores ranging from 0.33 to 0.48. Overall, the constrained models had the best performance of the approaches tested.