Mapping Soil Organic Matter and Analyzing the Prediction Accuracy of Typical Cropland Soil Types on the Northern Songnen Plain

Abstract

Soil organic matter (SOM) plays a critical role in agroecosystems and the terrestrial carbon cycle. Thus, accurately mapping SOM promotes sustainable agriculture and estimations of soil carbon pools. However, few studies have analyzed the changing trends in multi-period SOM prediction accuracies for single cropland soil types and mapped their spatial SOM patterns. Using time series 7 MOD09A1 images during the bare soil period, we combined the pixel dates of training samples and precipitation data to explore the variation in SOM accuracy for two typical cropland soil types. The advantage of using single soil type data versus the total dataset was evaluated, and SOM maps were drawn for the northern Songnen Plain. When almost no precipitation occurred on or near the optimal pixel date, the accuracies increased, and vice versa. SOM models of the two soil types achieved a lower root mean squared error (RMSE = 0.55%, 0.79%) and mean absolute error (MAE = 0.39%, 0.58%) and a higher coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.65, 0.75) than the model using the total dataset and resulted in a mean relative improvement (RI) of 30.21%. The SOM decreased from northeast to southwest. The results provide reference data for the accurate management of cultivated soil and determining carbon sequestration.

Keywords

• soil organic matter
• northern Songnen Plain
• single soil type
• pixel date
• prediction accuracy
• MOD09A1