Recent progress and future prospect of digital soil mapping： A review

• Published in: Journal of Integrative Agriculture Vol. 16; no. 12; pp. 2871 - 2885
• Main Authors: ZHANG, Gan-lin, LIU, Feng, SONG, Xiao-dong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing210008, P.R.China 01.12.2017; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P.R.China%State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing210008, P.R.China; KeAi Communications Co., Ltd
• Subjects: biodiversity; climate change; digital soil mapping; environmental health; food security; land degradation; predictive models; soil; soil functions; soil sampling; soil surveys; soil-landscape model; spatial variation; water management; spatial variation; digital soil mapping; predictive models; soil functions; soil-landscape model
• ISSN: 2095-3119; 2352-3425
• DOI: 10.1016/S2095-3119(17)61762-3

To deal with the global and regional issues including food security, climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss, water resource management, and ecosystem health, detailed accurate spatial soil information is urgently needed. This drives the worldwide development of digital soil mapping. In recent years, significant progresses have been made in different aspects of digital soil mapping. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a review for the major progresses of digital soil mapping in the last decade. First, we briefly described the rise of digital soil mapping and outlined important milestones and their influence, and main paradigms in digital soil mapping. Then, we reviewed the progresses in legacy soil data, environmental covariates, soil sampling, predictive models and the applications of digital soil mapping products. Finally, we summarized the main trends and future prospect as revealed by studies up to now. We concluded that although the digital soil mapping is now moving towards mature to meet various demands of soil information, challenges including new theories, methodologies and applications of digital soil mapping, especially for highly heterogeneous and human-affected environments, still exist and need to be addressed in the future.