CSIRO PUBLISHING

Soil Research, 2019, 57, 387–396

https://doi.org/10.1071/SR18319

Digital mapping of topsoil pH by random forest with

residual kriging (RFRK) in a hilly region

A
Lei Wang , Wei Wu B, and Hong-Bin Liu A,C
A
College of Resources and Environment, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing 400715, China.
B
College of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing 400715, China.
C
Corresponding author. Email: lhbin@swu.edu.cn

Abstract. Soil pH is a vital attribute of soil fertility. The accurate and efficient prediction of soil pH can provide the
necessary basic information for agricultural development. In the present study, random forest with residual kriging
(RFRK) was used to predict soil pH based on stratum, climate, vegetation and topography in a hilly region. The
performance of RFRK was compared with those of the classification and regression tree (CART) and the random forest
(RF). Comparative results showed that RFRK provided the best performance. The corresponding values of Lin’s
concordance correlation coefficient, coefficient of determination, mean absolute error and root mean square error were as
follows: 0.70, 0.51, 0.44 and 0.61 for CART; 0.80, 0.70, 0.34 and 0.48 for RF; and 0.88, 0.80, 0.25 and 0.39 for
RFRK. Stratum and average annual temperature were the most important factors affecting the soil pH in the study area.
Results indicate that RFRK is a feasible and reliable tool for predicting soil pH in hilly regions.

Additional keywords: classification and regression tree; digital soil mapping; soil pH.

Received 22 October 2018, accepted 1 March 2019, published online 9 April 2019

Introduction
Soil pH, as an important attribute of soil, exerts an impact on soil
fertility (Filippi et al. 2018), plant growth (Schwamberger and
Sims 1991) and other soil properties (Heggelund et al. 2014;
Tu et al. 2018). The accurate and efficient prediction of soil pH is
vital for agricultural development (Ou et al. 2017), ecological
modelling (Lauber et al. 2009) and environmental pollution
management (Ye et al. 2014). Traditional soil nutrient
prediction methods are mainly based on soil-survey mapping
(McBratney et al. 2000), which is not only time- and labour-
consuming, but also cannot easily and sufficiently provide detailed
information (Band and Moore 1995). As an alternative, digital soil
mapping (DSM) is used to accurately and efficiently describe the
soil spatial distribution (Zhu et al. 2010).
Various prediction methods, such as geostatistical methods
and multiple linear regression, have been used to produce the
spatial distribution of soil properties. However, multiple linear
regression relies on linear assumptions and does not consider
the spatial autocorrelation of soil properties (Guo et al. 2013).
Moreover, the relationships between soil properties and
environmental variables are often non-linear and complex
(Lark 1999; Tan et al. 2017). Geostatistical methods only
consider the spatial autocorrelation of the target variable
and ignore the influences of environmental variables (Guo
et al. 2015).
To overcome the limitations, a new hybrid approach called
random forest with residual kriging (RFRK) was introduced for
soil nutrient prediction (Li et al. 2011; Guo et al. 2015). RFRK
was developed on the basis of the random forest (RF) and
combines RF and ordinary kriging (OK). This method inherits
the advantages of RF and OK by taking into account the non-
linear relationships between soil properties and environmental
variables and spatial autocorrelation of target variables (Guo
et al. 2015). Previous studies have demonstrated that RFRK
outperforms other ordinary DSM methods, such as support
vector machine (SVM), OK, inverse distance squared (IDS),
stepwise linear regression (SLR) and RF (Li et al. 2011; Guo
et al. 2015; Tziachris et al. 2019; Szatmári and Pásztor 2019).
Li et al. (2011) used different methods to predict mud content in
the south-west Australian margin and found that RF and RFRK
outperformed SVM, OK and IDS. Guo et al. (2015) applied
RFRK to predict the soil organic matter of a rubber plantation
in Hainan Island, China and found that RFRK achieved
better results than SLR and RF. Tziachris et al. (2019) used
hybrid spatial models to predict soil organic matter and found that
RFRK outperformed other hybrid and ordinary machine learning
models. Szatmári and Pásztor (2019) predicted the soil organic
carbon store and found that RFRK was more optimally accurate
than universal kriging, sequential Gaussian simulation and
quantile regression forest. Moreover, RFRK was used to model
other kinds of spatial distribution, such as PM2.5, grassland leaf
area index (LAI), radionuclide map and precipitation (Liu et al.
2018; Li et al. 2016; Viscarra Rossel et al. 2014; Kim and Park
2016). Liu et al. (2018) applied RFRK to predict PM2.5, and the
model achieved refined spatial resolution and satisfactory results.
Li et al. (2016) predicted grassland LAI, and findings indicated
that RFRK outperformed partial least-squares regression,

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388 Soil Research
artificial neural networks (ANNs) and RF. Viscarra Rossel et al.
(2014) used RFRK to generate a radionuclide map that was
sufficiently accurate. However, although RFRK achieved the
aforementioned advantages and has been increasingly used in
modelling spatial distribution in various fields, its application in
predicting soil pH remains limited.
Soil is a complex entity that is influenced by several factors
(McBratney et al. 2003). Dokuchaev (1883) systematically
proposed that soil was developed from long-term interaction of
climate, biology, topography and parent material. Jenny (1941,
1980) emphasised that soil be considered a function of climate,
organisms, relief, parent material and time (i.e. abbreviated as
‘clorpt’). Soil pH, as an important attribute of soil, is affected by
numerous factors (Liu et al. 2013; Mosleh et al. 2016; Tan et al.
2017; Pahlavan-Rad and Akbarimoghaddam 2018). Tan et al.
(2017) predicted soil pH distribution in a hilly region based on
terrain attributes, climate indicators and geological units by
using geographically weighted regression. Liu et al. (2013)
found that soil pH distribution was controlled by precipitation,
topography, soil type and vegetation type based on IDW, splines,
OK and co-kriging. Mosleh et al. (2016) generated a soil pH
map based on topography, remote sensing, geology, soil type
and geomorphology by using ANN, boosted regression tree,
generalised linear model and multiple linear regression. The
present work considers the four factors of stratum, climate,
vegetation and topography, which correspondingly represent
parent material, climate, organism and terrain, to predict soil
pH in a hilly area. These data are easy to obtain with appropriate
precision.
The hilly region is widely distributed in south-west China and
has developed as important agricultural land over time. Therefore,
accurately and efficiently predicting the spatial distribution of soil
nutrients and analysing the controlling environmental factors in
the hilly region are important not only for DSM theory but also
for local agricultural development. The present study aimed to
(1) compare the performance of various methods; (2) use the best
method to predict the spatial distribution of soil pH; and
(3) investigate the importance of environmental factors that
control soil pH variability. The study was conducted in a
typical hilly area with complex topography in south-west China.
Materials and methods
Study area
The study area, Changshou District (1068490 –1078270 E,
298430 –308120 N) (Fig. 1), is located in the upper reaches of
the Yangtze River in south-west China. The total area is
1423 km2. The terrain is characterised as a typical hilly
region. The elevation (ELE) mainly varies from 500 to 900
m, with the highest and lowest points at 1034 and 175 m
respectively. Soil types include paddy soil, purple soil, fluvo-
aquic soil, yellow loam soil and lime (rock) soil (Xi et al. 1998).
Soil textures comprise loam, clay and sand. The strata consist of
Triassic limestone (ST1), Triassic Xujiahe Formation sandstone
(ST2), lower Jurassic Ziliujing Formation siltstone (ST3),
middle Jurassic Shaximiao Formation siltstone (ST4) and
upper Jurassic Suining Formation sand–mudstone (ST5) (Xi
et al. 1998). The climate is subtropical monsoon with annual
average temperature, precipitation, sunshine hours and frost-
L. Wang et al.
free period of 17.58C, 1154.8 mm, 1184.3 h and 336 days
respectively.
Data collection
A total of 5162 topsoil samples were collected from the
agricultural soil fertility survey database of Changshou
District. The soil samples were obtained after the crop
harvesting season. Each soil sample was mixed by 10–15
sub-samples collected within a radius of 10 m at a depth of
20 cm. The soil samples were dried at room temperature and
passed through a 2-mm soil sieve. Soil pH was measured in
soil–water suspension (1 : 2.5) with a pH meter.
Terrain indicators were derived from the ASTER GDEM V2
(Global Digital Elevation Model) with a resolution of 30 m. The
dataset was provided by the International Scientific and
Technical Data Mirror Site, Computer Network Information
Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.gscloud.cn).
ELE (Fig. 1), valley depth (VD) (Fig. 2a), vertical distance to
channel network (VDCN) (Fig. 2b), relative slope position
(RSP) (Fig. 2c) and topographic wetness index (TWI)
(Beven and Kirkby 1979) (Fig. 2d) were calculated by using
SAGA GIS v.6.4.
The normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), which
was downloaded from http://ladsweb.nascom.nasa.gov (Fig. 3),
was used to represent vegetation. The data are part of the MODIS
series land level 3 standard data product (MYD13Q1), which
belong to the Aqua afternoon satellite with a spatial resolution of
250 m and a time resolution of 16 days. A total of 230 satellite
images were collected from 2003 to 2012. All images were
subjected to atmospheric, radiation and geometric correction.
In addition, the Savitzky–Golay filter approach was used to
remove noise from the NDVI time series data (Chen et al.
2004). The average of the 2003–12 dataset was calculated with
the ArcGIS v.10.5 software. To match the DEM resolution, the
NDVI maps were resampled to 30 m resolution by the nearest
neighbour approach with the ArcGIS v.10.5 software.
Annual average temperature (AVTP) (Fig. 4a) and annual
average precipitation (AVPR) (Fig. 4b) were collated from the
World Meteorological Database (2ed) (http://www.worldclim.
org) with a resolution of 1000 m (Fick and Hijmans 2017). The
climate maps were also resampled to 30 m resolution to match
the DEM resolution.
The strata (Fig. 5) were digitised from the geological map at
a scale of 1 : 500 000. The study area comprised five strata,
namely, ST1, ST2, ST3, ST4 and ST5.
Methodology
Classification and regression tree (CART) is a machine learning
algorithm (Breiman et al. 1984) that is widely used in
classifying or predicting soil properties (Ließ et al. 2012;
Wu et al. 2018). CART generates a series of binary trees by
cyclically analysing the training dataset, and the final leaf nodes
are appointed as the classification or prediction values. Here,
CART was run in SPSS v.22.0, with the minimal parent node,
minimal child node and maximum tree depth set as 20, 10 and
20 respectively.
RF is derived from CART (Breiman 2001). In general, RF
consists of a large number of CARTs, and each CART
independently performs classification or prediction operation.
Digital soil pH mapping by RFRK: hilly region Soil Research 389

China Chongqing N

Changshou District

Legend
Training points
Validation points
Water
Elevation (m)
High : 1034
0 3 6 12 18 24
km Low : 175
Fig. 1. Location of study area and distribution of soil samples.

All results were voted or averaged as the final result. Moreover,
RF can determine the importance of input variables by
calculating the mean square error (MSE) or the Gini index
of out-of-bag data, and those variables with high MSE or Gini
index values are considered important. The current work
applied the relative importance (RI) by normalising the two
indices to determine the influence of environmental variables.
RF was run in MatLab ver. 2016a, with nTree (number of
CARTs) and mTry (number of feature variables on each non-
leaf node) of 500 and 3 respectively.
390 Soil Research L. Wang et al.

(a) (b)
N N

Legend Legend
Water Water

VD (m) VDCN (m)

High : 288.61 High : 361.76
0 3 6 12 18 24 0 3 6 12 18 24
km Low : 0 km Low : 0

(c) (d)
N N

Legend Legend
Water Water

RSP TWI
High : 1 High : 14.36
0 3 6 12 18 24 0 3 6 12 18 24
km Low : 0 km Low : 9.35

Fig. 2. Terrain indicators: (a) valley depth (VD), (b) vertical distance to channel network (VDCN), (c) relative slope position (RSP) and (d)
topographic wetness index (TWI).

RFRK is a combination of RF and OK. The RFRK procedure
can be summarised as follows:
Step 1: Soil pH is predicted by using RF with environmental
variables, and then residuals are calculated.
Step 2: OK is used to interpolate the residuals.
Step 3: The interpolated residuals are added to soil pH
(i.e. predicted in Step 1).
The formula of RFRK is
PRFRK ðpHÞ ¼ PRF ðpHÞ þ ROK ðpHÞ ð1Þ
where PRFRK (pH) is the soil pH value predicted by RFRK,
PRF (pH) is the soil pH value predicted by RF, and ROK (pH) is
the interpolated residuals of RF.
OK is a single-variable interpolation method based on the
spatial autocorrelation of target variables. Therefore, OK
requires that the target variables meet spatial autocorrelation.
A semi-variance function was used to determine the spatial
autocorrelation of RF residual. The nugget (Co) value, the sill
(Co + C) value and the optimal semi-variogram model were
calculated with the GS+ v.7.0 software. The nugget effect was
Digital soil pH mapping by RFRK: hilly region Soil Research 391

calculated with the Co/(Co + C) formula. According to
Goovaerts (1999), the spatial autocorrelation is strong if the
nugget effect is less than 25%, medium if between 25% and
100% and weak if greater than 100%.
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyse the
differences in soil pH amongst strata and between training and
validation datasets, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient was
used to determine the relationships between pH and quantitative
environmental variables. ANOVA and Pearson’s correlation
coefficient were calculated in SPSS v.22.0.
The digital soil pH maps, as predicted by CART, RF and
RFRK, were generated in ArcGIS v.10.5.

N N

Legend
Water
Legend Strata
ST1
Water
ST2
NDVI ST3
High : 0.67
0 3 6 12 18 24 ST4
0 3 6 12 18 24
km Low : 0.03
km ST5

Fig. 3. Vegetation: normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI). Fig. 5. Strata: Triassic limestone (ST1); Triassic Xujiahe Formation
sandstone (ST2); lower Jurassic Ziliujing Formation siltstone (ST3);
middle Jurassic Shaximiao Formation siltstone (ST4); upper Jurassic
Suining Formation sand-mudstone (ST5).

(a) (b)
N N

Legend Legend
Water Water
AVTP (°C) AVPR (mm)
High : 18.38 High : 1231
0 3 6 12 18 24 0 3 6 12 18 24
km Low : 15.17 km Low : 1161

Fig. 4. Climate factors: (a) annual average temperature (AVTP) and (b) annual average precipitation (AVPR).
392 Soil Research L. Wang et al.

Validation Table 1. Statistical characteristics of soil pH

CV, coefficient of variation
In evaluating model prediction performance, a separate dataset
containing 1062 samples (~20%) was randomly selected from Item n Min Max Mean s.d. CV Skewness Kurtosis
5162 samples (total) as the validation dataset. Lin’s concordance Total dataset 5162 4.20 8.30 5.90 0.86 14.58% 0.56 0.52
correlation coefficient (LCCC) (Lin 1989, 2000), coefficient of Training dataset 4100 4.20 8.30 5.90 0.86 14.53% 0.56 0.54
determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean Validation dataset 1062 4.20 8.30 5.87 0.87 14.77% 0.57 0.45
square error (RMSE) were used to evaluate model accuracy.
LCCC measures the agreement of two variables along a 458 line.
Table 2. Relationship between soil pH and strata (mean þ s.d.)
R2 (i.e. the square of the correlation coefficient) can be used to
Note: Letters denote l.s.d. at P < 0.05. ST1, Triassic limestone; ST2, Triassic
explain the proportion of variation of the dependent variables in
Xujiahe Formation sandstone; ST3, lower Jurassic Ziliujing Formation
the model. MAE is the arithmetic mean of the absolute values of siltstone; ST4, middle Jurassic Shaximiao Formation siltstone; ST5,
the error between measured and predicted values. RMSE is the upper Jurassic Suining Formation sand–mudstone
root mean square error between the measured values and the
predicted values. High LCCC and R2 values and low MAE and Item ST1 ST2 ST3 ST4 ST5
RMSE values indicate good modelling performance. The pH 6.53 ± 0.79d 6.08 ± 0.86e 5.52 ± 0.81b 5.65 ± 0.73b 6.77 ± 0.69a
equations of these indices are as follows:

 PÞ
LCCC ¼ 2rSM SP =½S2M þ S2P þ ðM
2 ð2Þ Table 3. Pearson’s correlation coefficients between soil pH and
quantitative environmental variables
X
n X
n Note: *P < 0.05 and **P < 0.01. AVTP, annual average temperature;
R2 ¼
2=
ðPi  MÞ
2
ðMi  MÞ ð3Þ AVPR, annual average precipitation; NDVI, normalised difference
i¼1 i¼1 vegetation index; VD, valley depth; TWI, topographic wetness index;
VDCN, vertical distance to channel network; ELE, elevation; RSP,
1X n
relative slope position
MAE ¼ jMi  Pi j ð4Þ
n i¼1 Item AVTP AVPR NDVI VD TWI VDCN ELE RSP
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi pH 0.024 0.022 0.019 0.119** 0.027 0.07** 0.025 0.131**
1X n
RMSE ¼ ðMi  Pi Þ2 ð5Þ
n i¼1
were neutral. Soils developed from ST3 and ST5 exhibited the
where r is the Pearson’s correlation coefficient; SM and SP are lowest and highest pH values respectively.
the standard deviations of the measured values and the predicted The results of Pearson’s correlation indicated that soil pH
values respectively; M
and P
are the mean values of the was negatively correlated with RSP, ELE, AVPR and AVTP
measured values and the predicted values respectively; and and positively correlated with VD and NDVI (Table 3).
Mi, Pi and n are the measured values, the predicted values, and
the validation sample number respectively.
Semi-variance of RF residual
The relative enhancement (RE) of the accuracy indicators
was used to evaluate the performance improvement of RFRK The calculated semi-variance of the RF residual was shown in
over CART and RF models. The equation is Fig. 6. The nugget (Co) and sill (Co + C) values were 0.0045 and
0.0458 respectively. The nugget effect [Co/(Co + C)] was 9.83%,
jRRFRK  Rj
RE ¼  100% ð6Þ which indicates that the residual had strong spatial autocorrelation
R (Goovaerts 1999). The optimal model for a semi-variogram is an
exponential model with a separation distance of 690 m.
where RE is the relative enhancement, RRFRK is the accuracy
indicator of RFRK, and R is the accuracy indicator of CART or
RF. Comparison of model performance
Results The prediction accuracy of RFRK was compared with those of
CART and RF by using the aforementioned separate validation
Descriptive statistics of soil pH dataset. RFRK obtained comparatively high LCCC and R2
The descriptive statistics of soil pH (Table 1) indicate that the values and low MAE and RMSE values (Table 4). RFRK
training dataset was highly similar to the validation dataset, and achieved remarkable improvements over CART and RF. The
the minimal pH and the maximal pH were 4.2 and 8.3 respectively. LCCC and R2 values were 0.70 and 0.51 for CART, 0.80 and
The ANOVA results did not show significant differences in soil 0.70 for RF, and 0.88 and 0.80 for RFRK respectively. The REs
pH between training and validation datasets. Soil pH exhibited in LCCC of RFRK over CART and RF were 26% and 10%
medium variability, and the coefficients of variation (CVs) were respectively. The REs in R2 of RFRK over CART and RF were
14.53% and 14.77% for the training dataset and the validation 57% and 14% respectively. The MAE and RMSE values were
dataset respectively (Nielsen and Bouma 1985). 0.44 and 0.61 for CART, 0.34 and 0.48 for RF and 0.25 and 0.39
Significant differences in soil pH were found for the strata for RFRK respectively. The REs in MAE of RFRK over CART
(Table 2). On average, soils developed from ST2, ST3 and ST4 and RF were 43% and 26% respectively. The REs in RMSE of
were weakly acidic, whereas soils developed from ST1 and ST5 RFRK over CART and RF were 36% and 19% respectively.
Digital soil pH mapping by RFRK: hilly region Soil Research 393

Table 4. Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient (LCCC), coefficient

of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square N
error (RMSE) of classification and regression tree (CART), random
forest (RF) and random forest with residual kriging (RFRK)

Item CART RF RFRK

LCCC 0.70 0.80 0.88
R2 0.51 0.70 0.80
MAE 0.44 0.34 0.25
RMSE 0.61 0.48 0.39

Table 5. Relative importance (RI) of variables produced by

random forest
ST, stratum; AVTP, annual average temperature; VD, valley depth; AVPR,
annual average precipitation; ELE, elevation; NDVI, normalised difference
vegetation index; VDCN, vertical distance to channel network; RSP, Legend
relative slope position; TWI, topographic wetness index Water
Soil pH
Item ST AVTP VD AVPR ELE NDVI VDCN RSP TWI
4.6–5.5
RI 23.51% 14.21% 11.91% 11.66% 11.12% 9.83% 6.10% 5.92% 5.74%
5.6–6.5
0 3 6 12 18 24
km 6.6–7.5
Isotropic variogram
0.0473 Fig. 7. Soil pH map produced by the classification and regression tree.

0.0354
Semi-variance

N
0.0236

0.0118

0.0000
0.00 9612.57 19225.14 28837.71

Separation distance (h)

Exponential model (Co = 0.00450; Co + C = 0.04580; Ao + 690.00; R2 = 0.748;
RSS = 1.892E–05)

Fig. 6. Semivariogram of the random forest residual. Co, nugget value; Legend
Co + C, sill value; C, partial sill value; Ao, separation distance; R2, Water
coefficient of determination; RSS, residual sum of squares. Soil pH
4.4–4.5
These results indicate that RFRK is the optimal model for
4.6–5.5
predicting soil pH at the study site.
5.6–6.5
6.6–7.5
Relative importance (RI) of variables 0 3 6 12 18 24
km 7.6–8.0
According to the RI results, the two most important variables were
ST and AVTP with RIs of 23.51% and 14.21% respectively Fig. 8. Soil pH map produced by random forest.
(Table 5). VD, AVPR and ELE obtained similar RI values.
acidic (pH = 4.6–5.5), weakly acidic (pH = 5.6–6.5), neutral (pH
Digital mapping of soil pH = 6.6–7.5) and alkaline (pH >7.5) soils respectively. Acidic soils
The three maps of soil pH produced by CART, RF and RFRK represent 88.44% of the total area, and this proportion is higher
obtained similar spatial distributions (Figs 7, 8 and 9). The than those of neutral and alkaline soils. Thus, the soils in
ranges of soil pH of CART, RF and RFRK were 4.6–7.5, Changshou District are generally acidic.
4.4–8.0 and 4.2–8.3 respectively. The maximum pH values
of CART and RF were underestimated, whereas the minimum Discussion
pH values were overestimated. These findings indicate that
CART and RF have ‘smoothing effects’. According to the Main influencing factors of soil pH
RFRK results, 0.09%, 33.1%, 55.25%, 11.45% and 0.11% of Strata greatly affect soil properties (Kassai and Sisák 2018).
the total area can be classified as strongly acidic (pH  4.5), Moreover, strata can be used to determine soil type, which is the
394 Soil Research
N study area. The effect of vegetation on soil pH can be attributed
Legend
Water
Soil pH
4.2–4.5
4.6–5.5
5.6–6.5
6.6–7.5
0 3 6 12 18 24
km 7.6–8.3
Fig. 9. Soil pH map produced by random forest with residual kriging.
basis of soil properties. In the study area, soils that developed
from the Jurassic siltstone stratum exhibited remarkably lower pH
values than that from the Jurassic sand–mudstone stratum.
According to Vaysse and Lagacherie (2015), a parent material
with mineralogy and texture index is the most importance factor
of soil pH prediction. Kassai and Sisák (2018) reported that strata
are among the best predictors for predicting soil properties. Many
researchers also found that parent material can significantly affect
soil pH (Gray et al. 2016; Tan et al. 2017).
AVTP and AVPR (i.e. climatic indices) were the second and
fourth most important influencing factors of soil pH in the study
area. AVTP affects soil properties by accelerating the weathering
and eluviation of rocks, whereas AVPR leads to soil eluviation.
The current study site is located in a subtropical monsoon climate
area with high temperature and precipitation. Under strong
leaching, the soils have become weakly acidic or acidic,
although the strata in this area originally had relatively high
contents of Ca2+ and Mg2+. Some researchers have emphasised
that soil pH is significantly and negatively related to precipitation
(Helyar et al. 1990; Ou et al. 2017), whilst other researchers have
found that climate is the main influencing factor of soil pH
(Vaysse and Lagacherie 2015; Kassai and Sisák 2018).
The effects of topography on soil pH cannot be ignored. VD
was the most important terrain factor affecting soil pH in the
study area. Topographical indices, such as VD, ELE, TWI,
VDCN and RSP, affect soil pH mainly through water and heat
redistribution. In the current work, soil pH was negatively
correlated with TWI, VDCN, RSP and ELE and positively
correlated with VD. This finding implies that soil pH decreases
as altitude increases. This may be due to the leaching effect.
With the increase of altitude, the leaching effect of rainfall
becomes increasingly intense, and the soil salt-based materials
tend to leach easily, which leads to acidic soils. Smith et al.
(2002) and Dharumarajan et al. (2017) reported similar results,
i.e. soil pH decreases with the increase in altitude.
L. Wang et al.
Vegetation was also an important factor of soil pH in the
to the remaining organisms in the soil after harvest. Previous
studies have shown that vegetation exerts an impact on soil
pH (Andrade and Mendonça-Santos 2016; Dharumarajan et al.
2017; Ou et al. 2017). Andriesse and Schelhaas (1987) found
that soil pH is increased when crop residues are burned, whereas
soil pH is decreased when crop residues are buried.
Comparison of CART, RF and RFRK
The results of LCCC, R2, MAE and RMSE suggest that RFRK
outperforms CART and RF in predicting soil pH. This finding
may be attributed to RFRK, which inherits the advantages of RF
and OK, and the consideration of non-linear relationships
amongst variables and the spatial autocorrelation of residual in
this study. The residual is the part of models that represents
unexplained information (Guo et al. 2015). Hengl et al. (2004)
reported that if residuals are spatially autocorrelated, then it can be
interpolated by kriging and combined with stepwise regression to
improve model performance. Kumar et al. (2012) and Guo et al.
(2015) reported that adding kriged residual to prediction models
can remarkably improve prediction accuracy.
RFRK also inherits the advantages of RF, i.e. the model does
not need to assume relationships between target and predictive
variables, and it does not lead to over-fitting. These advantages
enable RFRK to easily deal with various types of variables.
Conclusion
This research predicted the spatial distributions of soil pH by
using CART, RF and RFRK based on stratum, topography,
vegetation and climate indicators. The results from using an
independent validation dataset imply that RFRK outperforms
CART and RF. RFRK remarkably improved model performance
and enhanced prediction accuracy. The outcomes of RF indicate
that stratum and AVTP are the two most important indicators of
soil pH prediction in the study area. Thus, RFRK is a feasible and
reliable tool for predicting soil properties in hilly regions.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
This research did not receive any specific funding.
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