Digital Soil Boundary Detection Using Quantitative Hydrologic Remote Sensing

Abstract

Creating accurate soil maps at small scales using traditional methods is a time consuming and expensive process. However, remote sensing techniques can provide spatially and spectrally contiguous data in a timely manner. For this study, 20 root zone soil moisture maps derived from Landsat images during the growing season were used for the detection of soil boundaries. A split moving window analysis along two demonstration transects in, respectively, a semi-arid desert and riparian area located in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico showed that remotely sensed root zone soil moisture can reveal subsurface trends that can be used to identify soil boundaries which do not have a strong surface expression. Overall, the use of multiple remotely sensed root zone soil moisture images for soil boundary delineation shows great promise of becoming a valuable tool in the field of digital soil mapping.