Provision of soil information for biophysical modelling

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the generation of a framework for addressing soil data needs, specifically for biophysical modelling. The soil system is an important ecosystem actor, supporting most of the worlds' food production and being the major terrestrial carbon stocks, thereby information about it is crucial for management and policy making. To provide this information, it is important to deliver information of the highest possible quality; thus the need to define guidelines to standardise, not only the methodologies, but the minimum requirements that information must meet. In this project, providing soil data is addressed in two ways. The first scenario investigates the use of soil information to predict other soil properties, using pedotransfer function (PTFs). In the second scenario, it is assumed that the end-user does not have extra information about the soil properties at a specific location. In this case, the use of existing soil maps is a traditional solution, thus a framework for generating maps at national/continental scale, using digital soil mapping (DSM) techniques, is proposed.