Digital Updating of the Traditionally Compiled Soil Maps

The new approach for the updation of the traditional paper soil maps was provided. It is based on the imitation modeling of the traditional expert-based approaches for soil mapping. The result of the probe of our approach for soil mapping on the example of test site in the center of european part of Russia was given. The open-source script program IMSOIL was developed for soil maps updation on the R programming language. In the comparison to the others in our approach the expert-based knowledge of soil geography are also incorporated with the results of statistical data analysis. The updated soil map had much better consistency with the up-to-date soil forming factors data than the traditional paper soil map. The suggested approach of the imitation of soil mapping in geoinformational system includes using the good quality soil geography data and quantitative rules for soil mapping. The models in the form of decision trees can be analyzed by an expert, and the improvements to the covariates and obtained models can be made by him. The form of the decision trees of the soil mapping rules allowed to save up traditional qualitative description of the soil geography in the formalised representation and to integrate it with the unambiguous quantitative rules for soil mapping. They are based on the satellite data and thematic maps. Such a method allows automatically extracting relationships of the soils with the soil forming factors. The updation of the soil maps is accompanied by the probability map.