Vegetation Masking of Remote Sensing Data Aids Machine Learning for Soil Fertility Prediction

Soil nutrient content varies spatially across agricultural fields in hard-to-predict ways, particularly in floodplains with complex fluvial depositional history. Satellite reflectance data from the Sentinel-2 (S2) mission provides spatially continuous land reflectance data that can aid model development when used with point observations of nutrients. Reflectance from vegetation is assumed to obstruct land reflectance of bare soil, such that researchers have masked vegetation in models. We developed a routine for masking vegetation within Google Earth Engine (GEE) using Random Forest classification for iterative application to libraries of S2-images. Using gradient boosting, we then developed soil nutrient models for surface soils at a 250-ha agricultural site using S2 images. Soils were sampled at 2145 point locations to a 23-cm depth and analyzed for Ca, K, Mg, P, pH, S, and Zn. Results showed that masking vegetation improved model performance for models from subsets of the data (80% of samples used for model development, 20% validation), but full data sets did not require masking to achieve accuracy. Models of Ca, K, Mg, and S were successful (validation R2 > 0.60 to 0.96), but models for pH, P, and Zn failed. Bare soil composite images from S2 data are helpful in predicting soil fertility in low-relief floodplains.