SoilGrids250m: Global gridded soil information based on machine learning.

This paper describes the technical development and accuracy assessment of the most recent and improved version of the SoilGrids system at 250m resolution (June 2016 update). SoilGrids provides global predictions for standard numeric soil properties (organic carbon, bulk density, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), pH, soil texture fractions and coarse fragments) at seven standard depths (0, 5, 15, 30, 60, 100 and 200 cm), in addition to predictions of depth to bedrock and distribution of soil classes based on the World Reference Base (WRB) and USDA classification systems (ca. 280 raster layers in total). Predictions were based on ca. 150,000 soil profiles used for training and a stack of 158 remote sensing-based soil covariates (primarily derived from MODIS land products, SRTM DEM derivatives, climatic images and global landform and lithology maps), which were used to fit an ensemble of machine learning methods-random forest and gradient boosting and/or multinomial logistic regression-as implemented in the R packages ranger, xgboost, nnet and caret. The results of 10-fold cross-validation show that the ensemble models explain between 56% (coarse fragments) and 83% (pH) of variation with an overall average of 61%. Improvements in the relative accuracy considering the amount of variation explained, in comparison to the previous version of SoilGrids at 1 km spatial resolution, range from 60 to 230%. Improvements can be attributed to: (1) the use of machine learning instead of linear regression, (2) to considerable investments in preparing finer resolution covariate layers and (3) to insertion of additional soil profiles. Further development of SoilGrids could include refinement of methods to incorporate input uncertainties and derivation of posterior probability distributions (per pixel), and further automation of spatial modeling so that soil maps can be generated for potentially hundreds of soil variables. Another area of future research is the development of methods for multiscale merging of SoilGrids predictions with local and/or national gridded soil products (e.g. up to 50 m spatial resolution) so that increasingly more accurate, complete and consistent global soil information can be produced. SoilGrids are available under the Open Data Base License.

Breaking the link between environmental degradation and oil palm expansion: a method for enabling sustainable oil palm expansion.

Land degradation is a global concern. In tropical areas it primarily concerns the conversion of forest into non-forest lands and the associated losses of environmental services. Defining such degradation is not straightforward hampering effective reduction in degradation and use of already degraded lands for more productive purposes. To facilitate the processes of avoided degradation and land rehabilitation, we have developed a methodology in which we have used international environmental and social sustainability standards to determine the suitability of lands for sustainable agricultural expansion. The method was developed and tested in one of the frontiers of agricultural expansion, West Kalimantan province in Indonesia. The focus was on oil palm expansion, which is considered as a major driver for deforestation in tropical regions globally. The results suggest that substantial changes in current land-use planning are necessary for most new plantations to comply with international sustainability standards. Through visualizing options for sustainable expansion with our methodology, we demonstrate that the link between oil palm expansion and degradation can be broken. Application of the methodology with criteria and thresholds similar to ours could help the Indonesian government and the industry to achieve its pro-growth, pro-job, pro-poor and pro-environment development goals. For sustainable agricultural production, context specific guidance has to be developed in areas suitable for expansion. Our methodology can serve as a template for designing such commodity and country specific tools and deliver such guidance.