Prediction and Mapping of Soil Texture of a Plain Area Using Reflectance Spectra and Geo-statistics

Digital soil mapping methods based on Geo-statistics often needs a large number of samples.This study investigated a method that integrating geostatistics and visible-near-infrared(VNIR) spectroscopy to estimate soil texture of a plain area in Jiangsu province.Predictive models between soil texture(sand,silt and clay content) and VNIR spectroscopy were established.Soil texture data of training samples and those obtained from the predicted models were used for mapping soil texture using ordinary kriging method.A validation dataset produced the estimates of error for the predicted maps of sand,silt and clay expressed as RMSE with the values of 8.67%,6.90%,and 3.51%,respectively.This study demonstrates the possibility to potentially map regional soil texture variation digitally with considerable success.