Combining Digital Covariates and Machine Learning Models to Predict the Spatial Variation of Soil Cation Exchange Capacity

Fuat Kaya, Gaurav Mishra, Rosa Francaviglia () and Ali Keshavarzi
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Fuat Kaya: Department of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, Faculty of Agriculture, Isparta University of Applied Sciences, Isparta 32260, Türkiye
Gaurav Mishra: Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management, Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, Dehradun 248006, Uttarakhand, India
Rosa Francaviglia: Research Centre for Agriculture and Environment, Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, 00184 Rome, Italy
Ali Keshavarzi: Laboratory of Remote Sensing and GIS, Department of Soil Science, University of Tehran, P.O. Box 4111, Karaj 31587-77871, Iran

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: Cation exchange capacity (CEC) is a soil property that significantly determines nutrient availability and effectiveness of fertilizer applied in lands under different managements. CEC’s accurate and high-resolution spatial information is needed for the sustainability of agricultural management on farms in the Nagaland state (northeast India) which are fragmented and intertwined with the forest ecosystem. The current study applied the digital soil mapping (DSM) methodology, based on the CEC values determined in soil samples obtained from 305 points in the region, which is mountainous and difficult to access. Firstly, digital auxiliary data were obtained from three open-access sources, including indices generated from the time series Landsat 8 OLI satellite, topographic variables derived from a digital elevation model (DEM), and the WorldClim dataset. Furthermore, the CEC values and the auxiliary were used data to model Lasso regression (LR), stochastic gradient boosting (GBM), support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF), and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) machine learning (ML) algorithms were systematically compared in the R-Core Environment Program. Model performance were evaluated with the square root mean error (RMSE), determination coefficient (R 2 ), and mean absolute error (MAE) of 10-fold cross-validation (CV). The lowest RMSE was obtained by the RF algorithm with 4.12 cmol c kg −1 , while the others were in the following order: SVR (4.27 cmol c kg −1 ) Keywords: digital soil mapping; soil cation exchange capacity; feature selection; uncertainty; mountainous region; geomorphology; remote sensing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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