SOIL SAMPLING STRATEGIES

Soil Sampling Strategies



Abstract

The soil is the basis for establishing any project in agriculture, livestock, forestry, or civil constructions. Soil is formed from weathered organic and mineral debris at the Earth's surface. One of the soil sampling strategy's most powerful capabilities is its ability to monitor variation of diurnal or ephemeral soil properties as they change over time, in response to time of day, season, weather, and climate. , soil sampling strategy can be focused upon direct observation of soil properties. Remote-sensing instruments permit direct observation of certain physical characteristics of the soils surface.

Soil Sampling Strategies

Introduction

The Earth's soils form critical components of natural ecosystems, and the basis for production of food, fuel, and fiber. Use and preservation of these resources requires effective monitoring and management, which in turn depends upon preparation of accurate maps of soil distributions, and monitoring of temporal variations in soil status. In this context, remotely sensed imagery forms an essential tool for acquiring data representing soil distribution, and recording both temporal and spatial variation of soil properties.

The soil is the basis for establishing any project in agriculture, livestock, forestry, or civil constructions. Before any land use, it is necessary to know the characteristics of soil. In order to establish agricultural crops, pastures, or forest plantations, it is beneficial to evaluate physical, chemical, structure of soil. Geomorphology has enabled to improve understanding of earth structure, including the composition of elements and formation of compounds such as soil on earth (Ray et al, 2002). Geomorphology is the science that studies land-forms, including their shape (morphology) and spatial distribution (location and position in the landscape), the materials of which they are composed (bedrock, soils, sediment), and the processes that form, maintain, and change them over time (Lobell & Asner, 2002).

Soil Characteristics

Soil is formed from weathered organic and mineral debris at the Earth's surface. It is modified over time by weather and climate. At any place, its characteristics are the result of local climate and parent material modified by topography and vegetation over time. Such soil components interact to create soil pedons, three-dimensional soil bodies represented by two-dimensional soil profiles, vertical sequences of distinctive horizons. Each horizon can be envisioned as a layer formed by biological and physical processes acting in concert over intervals conventionally measured in several decades to millennia, at a minimum (Sullivan et al, 2005). Local differences in soil-forming processes lead to spatial variation in soil characteristics.

The soil landscape can be visualized as a mosaic of three-dimensional pedons. The average soil maps represent boundaries between adjacent pedons as sharp edges. They vary greatly in form and shape, characterized by gradations, outliers, inclusions, and transitional zones. Remote sensing of soils therefore must be practiced in the context of complex spatial variation (Burdt et al, 2005). With only rare exceptions, remote sensing techniques sense characteristics of the soil surface - even when subsurface properties can be assessed, they may convey little information about the soil profile. Although links between a soil's surface properties and ...