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Summary of the proposed research and expected deliverables
Soil-landscape relation is quite complex in real world scenario and vary continuously in the space-time continuum. Soils and parent material show gradual variations in the horizontal and vertical planes forming 3D bodies that are commonly anisotropic. Till recent, the 2-D based soil mapping using visual as well as digital techniques are in vogue. Subsequently digital mapping methods are used to map one or a few soil properties spatially. Similarly the continued development of airborne remote sensing, geophysics and infrared measurement now provide tools that can assist in the mapping of soil structure and properties rapidly in 2D, 3D and even 4D.
The need of the hour is to map the soil properties three dimensionally using geo- statistical approaches like radial basis function (RBF), krigging or data mining tools such as neural networks, Cubist, random forests, etc. or a combination of both. Besides, the 3-D visualization of soil properties using open source tools like openGL with geo-spatial querying will provide a new dimension to the way the soils are looked at. Such information will form a base line to develop 3D process based models involving pedo-transformations.
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