Validation of topsoil texture derived from agricultural soil maps by current dense soil sampling |
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| Authors: | Micha? St?pień Dariusz Gozdowski Stanis?aw Samborski Eike Stefan Dobers Jan Szaty?owicz Jaros?aw Chormański |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Agronomy, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Nowoursynowska 159, 02‐776 Warsaw, Poland;2. Department of Experimental Design and Bioinformatics, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Nowoursynowska 159, 02‐776 Warsaw, Poland;3. Ag‐GeoData, Seestra?e 10, 17235 Neustrelitz, Germany;4. Department of Environmental Improvement, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Nowoursynowska 159, 02‐776 Warsaw, Poland;5. Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Nowoursynowska 159, 02‐776 Warsaw, Poland |
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| Abstract: | Agricultural soil maps were created to facilitate the management of fields. Such maps, at very large scale (1:5000), cover almost the entire agricultural land in Poland. These maps can be very useful for precision field management. However, they were prepared about 40–50 years ago using old mapping techniques with mainly field (organoleptic) examination of soil. For this reason it is necessary to verify agreement between such maps with the current soil status. In the case of detection of disagreements it is important to identify the causes and propose methods for improving soil maps. Only few studies were made in this aspect. The soil texture (ST) of the upper layer, as presented on the agricultural soil maps from the 1960s and 1970s, was compared with the actual ST of the same four fields in northern and central Poland. For laboratory ST determination, soil samples were collected in a dense sampling network. On average, the agreement of the ST presented on the agricultural soil maps and determined in this study was classified as medium for three fields and good for one field. However, the presence of field areas with poor agreement between the ST determined in this study and that shown on the agricultural maps was detected in all investigated fields. Identified causes for this comprised imprecision of ST determination using the organoleptic method, the generalization of the soil quality maps, and erosion processes during the years between soil mapping and this investigation. The improvement of ST presentation on the large scale soil maps might be achieved by quite denser soil sampling for ST analysis supported by ECa, yield and NDVI maps. |
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| Keywords: | texture topsoil soil maps large scale validation |
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