The production of soil maps through digital soil mapping (DSM) techniques may be hampered due to the lack of traditional reference soil maps. In these situations, the tacit knowledge of the field soil scientist can be used for manual delineation of soil mapping units (MUs) based on generation of a map of occurrence of soil types predicted by DSM. The objective of this study was to evaluate and to compare soil maps generated by two methods. One method, called “direct […]

Digital elevation models (DEM) are fundamental sources for correlating the occurrence and distribution of soils in the landscape by digital soil mapping (DSM). The influence of the types and resolutions of DEMs on the predictive capability of prediction models of soil classes has not been greatly studied. This study evaluated and compared the effects of different DEMs on the prediction of occurrence of soil mapping units (MU). Twelve predictor variables derived from different DEMs were correlated with the occurrence of […]

Digital information generates the possibility of a high degree of redundancy in the data available for fitting predictive models used for Digital Soil Mapping (DSM). Among these models, the Decision Tree (DT) technique has been increasingly applied due to its capacity of dealing with large datasets. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of the data volume used to generate the DT models on the quality of soil maps. An area of 889.33 km² was chosen in […]

The region of greatest variability on soil maps is along the edge of their polygons, causing disagreement among pedologists about the appropriate description of soil classes at these locations. The objective of this work was to propose a strategy for data pre-processing applied to digital soil mapping (DSM). Soil polygons on a training map were shrunk by 100 and 160 m. This strategy prevented the use of covariates located near the edge of the soil classes for the Decision Tree […]

Map units directly related to properties of soil-landscape are generated by local soil classes. Therefore to take into consideration the knowledge of farmers is essential to automate the procedure. The aim of this study was to map local soil classes by computer-assisted cartography (CAC), using several combinations of topographic properties produced by GIS (digital elevation model, aspect, slope, and profile curvature). A decision tree was used to find the number of topographic properties required for digital cartography of the local […]

Phytoremediation – the use of plants and its associated microbial communities in the rizosphere to degrade, isolate and immobilize contaminants in soil and water – is a relatively cheap technique with aesthetic advantages free of additional impacts. However, most studies with plants to recover contaminated sites have been carried out in countries with temperate climate, where the potential of phytoremediation is limited by climate factors. In Brazil, knowledge regarding the phytoremediation potential of different species for tropical soils is still […]