Evaluating Conventional and Digital Soil Mapping for Updating Soil Maps in Iran: Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications for Sustainable Land Management

Soil maps serve as essential data sources for sustainable soil use, enabling the identification of soil characteristics and performance. Updating these maps is crucial for effective land management planning. Currently, soil maps are produced using two primary approaches: conventional soil mapping and digital soil mapping (DSM), each with distinct advantages and limitations. Key constraints of conventional methods include high time and cost requirements. In contrast, DSM has experienced rapid growth in recent years, driven by time and cost savings, enhanced access to spatial data, and advancements in software, fueling soil scientists' interest in this technique. Nevertheless, conventional maps remain vital for soil identification, classification, and distribution based on soil-landscape relationships. This review evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of both conventional mapping and DSM, focusing on their efficacy in updating soil maps, particularly in Iran’s context. Our analysis indicates that, despite the shortcomings of traditional methods, fully replacing them with DSM requires further research, making a definitive judgment challenging. A hybrid approach combining both methods may be optimal, depending on specific objectives. Furthermore, enhancing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of soil maps is imperative, with DSM necessitating advanced model development and incorporation of additional environmental covariates to improve estimation accuracy.