Digital Soil Mapping at multiple scales in British Columbia, Canada.

Scott Smith1, Chuck Bulmer2, Eve Flager1, Grace Frank1 and Deepa Filatow3
1
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, P.O. Box 500,
Summerland, BC V0H 1Z0 scott.smith@agr.gc.ca
2
Research and Knowledge Management Branch, BC Ministry of Forests, Vernon, BC
3
Ecosystem Information Branch, BC Ministry of Environment, Kelowna, BC

Abstract

Digital soil mapping (DSM) is being implemented to improve soil information for the
Canadian province of British Columbia. This paper reports on progress made in two
related initiatives. The first involves spatial disaggregation of detailed/semi-detailed
(1:20,000 - 1:125,000), harmonized, legacy soil survey information using a 25 m DEM
and several automated landform classification systems including a fuzzy land element
approach, unsupervised nested-means algorithm and a simple topographic position index.
Selective landform facet classes and additional co-variates including solar radiation and
ecological subzones are used as input variables to ArcSIE software to predict the
occurrence of individual soil series and their attributes over a semi-arid high relief
watershed of approximately 8,200 km2 in southern British Columbia. A second initiative
evaluates techniques utilizing map components from the 1:1,000,000 Soil Landscapes of
Canada map series to predict soil attributes on a 100 m DEM. The province-wide
prediction efforts address some of the key data and methodological challenges facing the
GlobalSoilMap.net project for the mountainous western Canadian landscape where soil
maps are readily available for many areas but point (pedon) data are limited.

_____________
Smith, S., C. Bulmer, E. Flager, G. Frank and D. Filatow 2010. Digital soil mapping at multiple
scales in British Columbia, Canada. In Program and Abstracts, 4th Global Workshop on Digital
Soil Mapping, 24-26 May 2010, Rome, Italy. pg 17.

1. Introduction

British Columbia is a large and ecologically diverse province in western Canada. In

addressing a range of issues there is ever increasing demand from environmental modelers
for spatially-explicit landscape information. MacMillan et al. (2010) have described a
recent project to predict ecosystem types in central British Columbia. The semi-arid
climate and increasing demand for water from within the Okanagan Watershed and
surrounding watersheds has led to significant activity in hydrologic and climate change
modeling to support water supply and demand studies (Neilsen et al. 2006). Also, demand
for alternative energy sources has given rise to the need for land sensitivity assessments
with respect to forest biomass harvesting (Titus et al. 2009). Finally, projects like
GlobalSoilMap.net (Sanchez et al. 2009) will require provincial-scale production of raster
soil maps of key soil attributes. In southern British Columbia, legacy soil maps and

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databases exist at a range of scales that can be utilized to meet these demands but in all
cases downscaling or spatial disaggregation (McBratney 1998) is required to produce the
required gridded outputs. In this paper we outline our initial approach to the preparation
of a 25 m gridded digital soil map of the Okanagan watershed from legacy soil survey
maps using existing software tools and local pedological knowledge. Secondly, we
describe some initial approaches to the disaggregation of generalized soil mapping which
is available for the entire province, i.e. the Soil Landscapes of Canada (SLC) coverage
(Geng et al. 2010). Because of this, the SLC polygon components are used in a wide
range of applications where provincial coverage is required, despite the fact that this small
scale (1:1,000,000) coverage lacks detail in both spatial location and soil attribute
information. Applying digital techniques to downscale the SLC polygons components
could address both of these limitations, and improve efforts to model soil-dependant
environmental processes on provincial and national scale.

2. Study Area

Our initial efforts in disaggregating legacy soil survey information has taken place in
southern British Columbia, a mountainous region characterized by a series of north-south
trending mountain ranges interspersed with broad high elevation (1,000-2,000 m asl)
plateaus deeply incised by major river systems flowing to the Pacific Ocean to the west
(Figure 1).

Figure 1. Location of study area in southern British Columbia. The Okanagan Basin watershed
sits within the rain shadow of coastal mountain ranges. Water flow is south across the
international boundary into the Columbia River which empties into the Pacific Ocean near
Portland, Oregon.

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The climate in the lowest elevation valley systems (<750 m asl) is semi-arid characterized
by grasslands and open forests of Pinus ponderosa and Pseudotsuga menziesii var.
glauca. At elevations above 750 m temperatures cool and precipitation increases and
closed forests of spruce and pine exist up to tree line at approximately 2300 m elevation.
There is clear ecological zonation evident in the plant species that make up the forests.
These biogeoclimatic zones (Meidinger and Pojar 1991) have been characterized and
mapped for forest management purposes and provide useful stratification of the landscape.
The Okanagan watershed is host to wide variety of soil parent materials due to the
complex bedrock and surficial geology of the area. The landscape ranges from mountains
to till-covered rolling uplands, rocky valley sidewalls to a complex of glacial drift and
Holocene sediments in the valley bottom.

Within the southern interior of British Columbia the Okanagan watershed was selected to
test operational approaches to disaggregation of detailed and semi-detailed mapping while
portions of the nearby plateau landscapes were used to test approaches to the
disaggregation of Soil Landscapes of Canada v2.2 polygon components (Geng et al. 2010,
CLBRR 1996).

3. Methods

3.1 Disaggregation of detailed and semi-detailed maps

A knowledge driven, predictive mapping approach was used to disaggregate

conventional soil survey maps of the Okanagan watershed. Five vector soil maps were
spatially merged and correlated into a valley-wide coverage of polygons containing up to
three different soil series each. Soils on the valley bottom had been surveyed at a 1:20,000
scale (Wittneben 1986) and upland areas at 1:50,000 (BC Ministry of Environment 1995)
or 1:125,000 scales (Lord and Green 1974).
The ArcGIS™ extension, ArcSIE version 9.2.402 (Shi 2010) was used to infer the
distribution of some 130 discrete soil classes by applying knowledge-based fuzzy
classification rules to selected predictor input layers (MacMillan et al. 2007, Zhu et al.
2001). The prediction was applied to over 800,000 ha within the Okanagan Watershed ,
using elevation, slope, solar radiation, topographic position index (TPI), a multipath
wetness index, biogeoclimatic (ecological) zone, curvature, and relative slope position as
environmental covariates. All landform covariates were derived from a 25 m digital
elevation model (Base Mapping and Geomatics Services Branch 2002). Biogeoclimatic
zones (Meidinger and Pojar 1991), were rasterized from 1:20,000 polygons. As a
surrogate for aspect, annual solar radiation was created using Solar Analyst 1.0 and
ArcView™ 3.2, and calculated as the sum of direct and diffuse radiation. The TPI was
calculated using an ArcView 3.2 extension (Jenness 2006), and multipath wetness index
was calculated using ArcSIE. The relative slope position was calculated following the
algorithm of MacMillan et al. (2000).

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 An attribute rule base was created using characteristics of each soil series’
covariate pixel frequency histograms. These histograms are comprised of covariate pixel
values that spatially underlie polygons mapped as ‘pure’ ( i.e. single component) units of
a particular soil series. Either the modal pixel value for attributes with integer values, or
mean value for attributes with floating point values, was chosen to represent the highest
occurrence probability for that soil series. These values, along with the histogram
minimum and maximum were used to create the rule-based reasoning curves in the
inference engine in ArcSIE.
The methods used in calculating fuzzy memberships for valley bottom soils
differed from upland soils due to larger scale of the soil survey map and less variability of
topographic covariates in the valley bottom. A larger scale TPI, calculated using a 250 m
neighbourhood, suited valley bottom soils better than the 1000 m neighborhood used for
upland soils. Because there was less variety in valley bottom topography, an additional
covariate was utilized to differentiate soil series. The vector soil map, rasterized on each
soil component, was used as a covariate input to ArcSIE. A weighted membership
function was applied to the rule set such that the soil map inputs were weighted less than
the other covariates. This method had the effect of encouraging, but not constraining, the
prediction of a soil to areas in which it was originally mapped. No soil map inputs were
used to predict upland soils, rather ArcSIE’s limiting factor membership function of
ecological co-variates and landform derivatives was used to infer soil type. This limiting
function compares an environmental configuration at a specific location to the rule set for
a soil series, and chooses the minimum optimality value among the covariates as the
overall optimal value for that location.
The membership maps for all valley bottom and upland soil series were then
“hardened” to grid cells to produce a disaggregated soil surface. Assigned pixel classes
are the soil series with the highest predicted membership at that cell. Masking was used to
exclude identified areas of bedrock outcropping (rasterized from forest cover maps),
water, wetlands, roads, and urban areas (rasterized from local cadastral maps) from the
inference exercise.

3.2 Disaggregation of Soil Landscape maps

Building on the disaggregation efforts with detailed soil mapping in the Okanagan
watershed, we explored the use of DSM for spatial disaggregation of the small scale SLC
coverage. Initial efforts focused on a proportional approach, while the integration of
automated landscape classification was also considered.
Our approach to disaggregation focuses on the use of datasets with provincial
coverage. Currently these datasets include a 1ha DEM, and vector layers representing
biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification zones, wetlands, lakes, and rivers. As a first
approximation, a proportional disaggregation method was applied over a small portion of
southern British Columbia adjacent to the Okanagan Watershed using these provincial
datasets and expert pedological knowledge.
Most SLC polygons contain more than one soil component. In our proportional
method, we use the DEM and its derivatives, along with the other datasets to create the
most likely distribution of the soils mapped for the area, while maintaining the relative
amounts of each component within the polygon. After extracting elevation and other

4
attributes for each polygon into a database file, and determining decile values of their
distribution within the polygon, a threshold value is set where the decile value of the
limiting attributes match the proportion of each component. The limiting attributes are
selected based on the expected relationship between important landscape characteristics
(e.g. elevation, slope, wetness) and the soil component attributes. The thresholds are then
applied in ArcSIE as limiting factors to assign the soil components to their predicted
position in the landscape. One feature of this approach is that the proportion of each soil
component in the area occupied by the original soil polygon is fixed. In effect, the
method relies on an accurate estimate of the proportional assignment of components by
the original soil surveyor, and on our ability to select the landscape characteristics that
control the soil distribution in the landscape.
In order to evaluate the functionality of landscape classification in disaggregation,
we used the approach of MacMillan et al. (2000) to generate landform classes or facets
that might correlate to SLC components, and compared their distribution to the predicted
soil component locations within the polygons.

4. Results

A map depicting soil series was created by hardening classes with the highest
fuzzy membership values to each 25 m grid cell. The result produced significantly more
spatial resolution of distribution and complexity of soil series as they occupy the
topographical niches in the landscape.

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Figure 2. Illustration of results of disaggregation from 1:50,000 mapping on the upland portion of
the watershed (a) to the 25 m DEM grid (b); and from 1:20,000 mapping at low elevation along
portions of the valley floor (c) to the 25 m DEM (d). Polygon map colours based on primary
component listed for each polygon. Dashed line in illustration (c) denotes break between the two
scales of mapping and the related difference in polygon density and size.

The elevational constraints imposed when assigning a soil series to an ecological

zone is evident in a degree of elevational banding of some series. Backslopes and ridge
crests show considerable detail in the distribution of soil types well beyond what is
possible to show in vector maps (Figure 2b). On the valley floor, 1:20,000 mapping was
disaggregated using the mapped soils as input to the predicted mapping and not
surprisingly we had good correlation of mapped versus predicted soil series in these
instances. Because we were dealing with so many soil series (<100), in many instances,
individual soil series were predicted in locations were they were not originally mapped.
Validation of our output requires both testing against vector map composition as well as
against ground truth observations.
The initial comparison between predicted and mapped soil series shows results
vary depending considerably depending on location within the watershed.

Figure 3. Outline of selected SLC polygon (ID #591611 and 590078) showing a) the results of our
disaggregation using the proportional method. and, b) landscape classification using the approach
of MacMillan et al. (2000).

6
 With respect to our disaggregation of generalized maps, Figure 3a shows a portion
of southern BC with disaggregation of two SLC polygons. In the large polygon (591611)
there were only 2 components (soil associations) listed, 30% of the area as a soil formed
on colluvium on steep slopes and 70% as a soil formed on moraine on moderate slopes.
With only two components is a simple process of selecting a break in slope (in this case
24% slope) based on the component proportions. Figure 3a depicts the 30% steepest
sloping pixels in red (soil code BKI) and the remainder of the polygon in green (soil code
WIB). The smaller polygon (590078) contained 5 components including a wetland soil
and an alpine tundra soil. In this case these 5 components were assigned to pixels
proportionately but using a range of derived attributes. Some of the components in these
generalized polygons can be assigned to one or more landform facets as shown in Figure
3b. From the illustration it is evident that the landscape classification provides
considerably more detail than is necessary to make this distinction. It is also evident that
SLC components only describe the dominant soil conditions, and many significant, but
less spatially extensive soil types may not represented. This situation will likely occur
over very large areas of BC, and approaches to address this shortcoming will be needed.

5. Conclusions

We have outlined the initial and rather preliminary steps taken to use DEM to
improve the quality and utility of soil information for the Canadian province of British
Columbia. This remains a work in progress and a capacity building exercise for the
authors. Field validation and sensitivity testing of the ArcSIE methodology remain to be
completed. However, our combined approach using multiple scales of mapping and
readily available software has provided insight into how to approach the
operationalization of DSM. On-going validation efforts and refinements of output will
lead us to explore additional independent co-variates beyond simple DEM derivatives
(e.g. radiometric data) and to better refine those co-variates we do use.
The use of ArcSIE proved to be effective in managing data and providing a user-
friendly platform for inference modelling. It is our observation from our detailed
disaggregation efforts that the inference model is highly sensitive to the inference function
used (limiting factor vs weighted average) and to even minor weighting adjustments to co-
variate inputs. No single approach worked best in the entire study area, confirming the
notion that multiple ‘rulesheds’ based on ecological criteria, scale of inputs, or degree of
relief are a requirement to fine-tuning output.
Overall, our project suggests that relatively straightforward analysis of DEM
derivatives provides very valuable information for the preliminary disaggregation of small
scale soil maps. By incorporating a landform classification into this approach (e.g. Bui
and Moran 2001), we expect to improve the assignment of soil components, and further
refine predictions. However it is also clear that over wide areas, co-variates other than
those derived from the 100 m DEM available for the province will be required to achieve
satisfactory results. Many of the SLC components are defined on soil parent material type
and soil texture. Often only the dominant soil landscape components are defined within a
polygon leaving much of the landscape potentially unclassified. Such a condition will
require either subdividing the component into subtypes, or the addition of new

7
components to the polygon based on tacit knowledge. Despite this, our approach appears
adequate for a rapid separation of certain soil components within SLC polygons, and
provides an illustration of what possibilities exist for incorporating landform
classifications into spatial disaggregation.

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