Incorporating agricultural practices in digital mapping improves prediction of cropland soil organic carbon content: The case of the Tuojiang River Basin

Accurate mapping of soil organic carbon (SOC) in cropland is essential for improving soil management in agriculture and assessing the potential of different strategies aiming at climate change mitigation. Cropland management practices have large impacts on agricultural soils, but have rarely been considered in previous SOC mapping work. In this study, cropland management practices including carbon input (CI), length of cultivation (LC), and irrigation (Irri) were incorporated as agricultural management covariates and integrated with natural variables to predict the spatial distribution of SOC using the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model. Additionally, we evaluated the performance of incorporating agricultural management practice variables in the prediction of cropland topsoil SOC. A case study was carried out in a traditional agricultural area in the Tuojiang River Basin, China. We found that CI was the most important environmental covariate for predicting cropland SOC. Adding cropland management practices to natural variables improved prediction accuracy, with the coefficient of determination (R2), the root mean squared error (RMSE) and Lin's Concordance Correlation Coefficient (LCCC) improving by 16.67%, 17.75% and 5.62%, respectively. Our results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating agricultural management practice information into SOC prediction models. We conclude that the construction of spatio-temporal database of agricultural management practices derived from inventories is a research priority to improve the reliability of SOC model prediction.