Digital Soil Assessments and Beyond
Proceedings of the 5th Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping 2012, Sydney, Australia

Digital soil assessments and beyond contains papers presented at the 5th Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping, held 10-13 April 2012 at the University of Sydney, Australia. The contributions demonstrate the latest developments in digital soil mapping as a discipline with a special focus on the use of map products to drive policy decisions particularly on climate change and food, water and soil security. The workshop and now this resulting publication have better united formerly disparate subdisciplines in soil science: pedology (study of the formation, distribution and potential use of soils) and pedometrics (quantitative and statistical analysis of soil variation in space and time). This book compiles papers covering a range of topics: digital soil assessment, digital soil modelling, operational soil mapping, soil and environmental covariates, soil sampling and monitoring and soil information modelling, artificial intelligence and cyber-infrastructure, and GlobalSoilMap. Digital soil assessments and beyond aims to encourage new mapping incentives and stimulate new ideas to make digital soil mapping practicable from local to national and ultimately global scales.

1. Digital Soil Assessments 2. Digital Soil Mapping in the environment 3. Soil maps, legacy data & covariates 4. Digital Soil Modelling 5. Digital mapping of soil classes 6. Sampling and Monitoring in DSM 7. Cyber infrastructure & Expert system in DSM 8. Operational DSM 9. Proximal, remote sensing and spectroscopy of soil 10. GlobalSoilMap.net

Budiman Minasny is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Agriculture & Environment at the University of Sydney in Australia. He was awarded the QEII Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to develop methodologies for creating a global soil map. His research interest is to link soil observations with process-based models and also to develop empirical models to allow greater understanding of soil variation in space and time.

Brendan Malone is a research fellow of Digital Soil Mapping in the Faculty of Agriculture & Environment at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is working on an Australian Research Council linkage project with the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment where he is developing new and updated spatial soil information systems for new sustainable irrigated agriculture in Tasmania, Australia. Brendan’s research interest is in furthering methodologies for digital soil assessments and aligning soil information and related products to the needs and specifications of the soil information end-users.

Alex McBratney is Professor of Soil Science in the Faculty of Agriculture & Environment at the University of Sydney in Australia. He is chief editor of the global soil science journal, Geoderma, and co-editor-in-chief of the book series Progress in Soil Science. Alex is a consummate pedometrician and soil scientist striving to understand soil variation in all its dimensions.