Experience in digital mapping of soil cover patterns

Methodological problems of large-scale soil mapping with the use of digital mapping technologies are discussed. Two variants of obtaining the maps of soil combinations for a test polygon (30 km²) in the area of soddy-podzolic soils with 996 studied soil pits are described. In the first variant, the initial state of soils at studied points was characterized by the taxonomic name of the soil (at the level of soil subtypes); the probability of occurrence of different subtypes within operation cells of the digital map was estimated, and the most probable soil subtypes were assigned to them. This approach was tested for the first time. In the second variant, the initial state of soils at studied points was described with the help of the grades of ecologically meaningful features of soil morphology; the degree of soil gleying and the degree of soil erosion or aggradation were indicated. The integral digital map represented the areas of different agroecological groups of soil combinations. The maps obtained with the help of these two approaches show a satisfactory agreement with the maps of soil cover patterns compiled by traditional methods earlier.