7 Digital Soil-Terrain Modeling: The Predictive Potential and Uncertainty

Research in the past 20 years has demonstrated that digital terrain models are a useful secondary information source for the prediction of soil properties and classes. This chapter begins with a brief introduction to digital terrain modeling; in particular, the types of terrain attributes that can be calculated from a digital elevation model (DEM) are described. The next section reviews soil-terrain modeling, with an emphasis on the variety of prediction methods that have been used. A summary of published soil-terrain studies is given. The second half of the chapter presents a case study aimed at illustrating the impact that the source DEM spatial resolution and uncertainty have on soil-terrain prediction models. The study site is a 74-ha field in Australia. The datasets include a 5-m DEM created from a carrier-phase global positioning systems (GPS) survey, a 25-m

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