Effect of Land Use Types on the Spatial Prediction of Soil Nitrogen

Mapping the spatial distribution of soil nutrient contents from sample data has received much attention in the recent decade. Accurately mapping soil nutrients purely based on sample data, however, is difficult due to the sparsity and high cost of samples. Land use types usually influence the contents of soil nutrients at the local level and it is desirable to integrate such information into predictive mapping. The area-and-point kriging (AAPK) method, which was proposed recently, may provide an interpolation technique for such purposes. This study mapped the soil total nitrogen (TN) distribution of Hanchuan County, China, using AAPK with sample data (consisting of 402 points) and land use information. Ordinary kriging (OK) and residual kriging (RK) were compared to evaluate the performance of AAPK. Results showed that: (1) land use types had important impacts on the spatial distribution of soil TN; (2) measured data at 135 validation locations had stronger correlation with the data predicted by AAPK than by RK and OK, and the mean error and root mean square error with AAPK were lower than with RK and OK; and (3) AAPK generated smaller error variances than RK and OK did. This suggests that AAPK represents an effective method for increasing the interpolation accuracy of soil TN. It should be pointed out that some of the land use polygons used in this study are very large and complex, which might impact the effectiveness of AAPK in improving the prediction accuracy. Segmenting them into simple smaller areas might be helpful.