| heal.abstract |
Collecting soil data is time-consuming and costly, often exceeding practical possibilities. A methodology for the delineation of soil mapping units in an alluvial plain of Western Peloponnese, Greece, was investigated. A detailed soil survey of an area of 300 ha was used to obtain the basic soil data for evaluating the performance of the proposed methodology. The methodology consists of the following steps: (a) data collection from borings and representative soil profiles, (b) definition of the soil mapping units in the study area, (c) determination of the range of the diagnostic variables for each mapping unit from field observations and statistical analysis of the analytical data from representative soil profiles, (d) determination of the class of each diagnostic variable by observation at a network of boring points, (e) subjective assignment of numerical values to soil variables at the bore points, (f) estimation of the values of each soil variable at the points of a regular grid using the interpolation methods kriging and inverse squared distance, (g) application of the fuzzy set theory to the interpolated data and the production of thematic fuzzy maps, and (h) validation of the results through a number of independent test borings. The results obtained show that the proposed methodology can produce soil maps of recent alluvial plains with acceptable accuracy and cost. |
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