An official website of the European Union How do you know?      
European Commission logo
JRC Publications Repository Menu

Mapping topsoil physical properties at European scale using the LUCAS database

cover
The Land Use and Cover Area frame Statistical survey (LUCAS) aimed at the collecting harmonized data about the state of land use/cover over the extent of European Union (EU). Among these 2•105 land use/cover observations selected for validation, a topsoil survey was conducted at about 10% of these sites. Topsoil sampling locations were selected as to be representative of European landscape using a latin hypercube stratified random sampling, taking into account CORINE land cover 2000, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM and its derived slope, aspect and curvature. In this study we will discuss how the LUCAS topsoil database can be used to map soil properties at continental scale over the geographical extent of Europe. Several soil properties were predicted using hybrid approaches like regression kriging. In this paper we describe the prediction of topsoil texture and related derived physical properties. Regression models were fitted using, along other variables, remotely sensed data coming from the MODIS sensor. The high temporal resolution of MODIS allowed detecting changes in the vegetative response due to soil properties, which can then be used to map soil features distribution. We will also discuss the prediction of intrinsically collinear variables like soil texture which required the use of models capable of dealing with multivariate constrained dependent variables like Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS). Cross validation of the fitted models proved that the LUCAS dataset constitutes a good sample for mapping puropses leading to cross-validation R2 between 0.47 and 0.50 for soil texture and normalised errors between 4 and 10%.
2015-08-03
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
JRC92074
0016-7061,   
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706115300173,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC92074,   
10.1016/j.geoderma.2015.07.006,   
Language Citation
NameCountryCityType
Datasets
IDTitlePublic URL
Dataset collections
IDAcronymTitlePublic URL
Scripts / source codes
DescriptionPublic URL
Additional supporting files
File nameDescriptionFile type 
Show metadata record  Copy citation url to clipboard  Download BibTeX
Items published in the JRC Publications Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Additional information: https://ec.europa.eu/info/legal-notice_en#copyright-notice