Lagacherie P., McBratney A.B., Voltz M. (Eds.) Digital Soil Mapping: An Introductory Perspective

Amsterdam: Elsevier. – 2007. – 658 p. (Developments in Soil Science – Volume 31) This book is based on scientific contributions to a Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping held in Montpellier (Campus Agronomique de la Gaillarde) in September 2004. Although it has been put into practice for several years by soil scientists through the development of soil databases, soil information systems and the increasing use of numerical techniques in the prediction of soil variability, the concept of Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) has only been introduced recently and this workshop is the first specifically devoted to it. The definition of Digital Soil Mapping certainly needs to be further elaborated, but for the time being we feel that it could be formulated as the creation and population of spatial soil information systems by numerical models inferring the spatial and temporal variation of soil types and soil properties from soil observation and knowledge and from related environmental variables. Accordingly, the workshop aimed to gather around the topic of Digital Soil Mapping, soil surveyors interested in numerical techniques and pedometricians willing to extend their approaches to more operational scales. Eighty scientists from 17 different countries attended this meeting, which provided a large overview of the state of the art of this nascent discipline. In this book we have compiled the best ideas and methodologies that emerged from this workshop. Rather than being the last word on the subject, this is the first word in book form – hence the subtitle. We envisage significant developments in the coming years. From this perspective a Digital Soil Mapping working group has been created within IUSS. As Digital Soil Mapping is moving from the research phase to the operational production of digital soil maps, we hope it will soon provide a significant contribution to the management of land resources throughout the world.List of contributors
ForewordDedicationDigital soil mapping: current state and perspectives
Conception and handling of soil databases
Sampling methods for creating digital soil maps
New environmental covariates for digital soil mapping
Quantitative modelling for digital soil mapping
Example of predicting soil classes
Example of predicting soil attributes
Quality assessment and representation of digital soil maps
Author Index
Subject Index
Colour Plate Section to be found at the end of the book