Digital Soil Mapping - Ambiguities

Ambiguities

DSM can rely upon, but is considered to be distinct from traditional soil mapping, which involves manual delineation of soil boundaries by field soil scientists. Soil maps (paper sheets) produced as result of manual delineation of soil mapping units may also be digitized or surveyors may draw boundaries using field computers, hence both traditional, knowledge-based and technology and data-driven soil mapping frameworks are in essence digital. Unlike traditional soil mapping, Digital Soil Mapping is, however, considered to make an extensive use of:

1. technological advances, including GPS receivers, field scanners, and remote sensing, and
2. computational advances, including geostatistical interpolation and inference algorithms, GIS, digital elevation model, and data mining

In digital soil mapping, semi-automated techniques and technologies are used to acquire, process and visualize information on soils and auxiliary information, so that the end result can be obtained at cheaper costs. Products of the data-driven or statistical soil mapping are commonly assessed for the accuracy and uncertainty and can be more easily updated when new information comes available.

Digital Soil Mapping tries to overcome some of the drawbacks of the traditional soil maps that are often only focused on delineating soil-classes i.e. soil types. Such traditional soil maps:

• do not provide information for modeling the dynamics of soil conditions and
• are inflexible to quantitative studies on the functionality of soils.