Sampling scheme optimization to map soil depth to petrocalcic horizon at field scale

Abstract Soil depth has played a key role in the development of soil survey, implementation of soil-specific management and validation of hydrological models. Generally, soil depth at field scale is difficult to map due to complex interactions of factors of soil formation at field scale. As a result, the conventional sampling schemes to map soil depth are generally laborious, time consuming and expensive. In this study, we presented, tested and evaluated a method to optimize the sampling scheme to map soil depth to petrocalcic horizon at field scale. The method was tested with real data at four agricultural fields localized in the southeast Pampas plain of Argentina. The purpose of the method was to minimize the sample dataset size to map soil depth to petrocalcic horizon based on ordinary cokriging, five calibration sample sizes (returned by Conditioned Latin hypercube –cLHS-), and apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) or elevation as variables of auxiliary information. The results suggest that (i) only 30% of samples collected on a 30-m grid are required to provide high prediction accuracy ( R 2  > 0.95) to map soil depth to petrocalcic horizon; (ii) an independent validation dataset based on 50% of the samples on a 30-m grid is adequate to validate the most realistic accuracy estimate; and (iii) ECa and elevation, as variables of auxiliary information, are sufficient to map soil depth to petrocalcic horizon. The method proposed provides a significant improvement over conventional to map soil depth and allows reducing cost, time and field labour. Extrapolation of the results to other areas needs to be tested.