Digital Soil Assessments and BeyondEdition 1

Digital soil assessments and beyond contains papers presented at the 5th Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping, held 10-13 April 2012 at the University of Sydney, Australia. The contributions demonstrate the latest developments in digital soil mapping as a discipline with a special focus on the use of map products to drive policy decisions particularly on climate change and food, water and soil security. The workshop and now this resulting publication have better united formerly disparate subdisciplines in soil science: pedology (study of the formation, distribution and potential use of soils) and pedometrics (quantitative and statistical analysis of soil variation in space and time). This book compiles papers covering a range of topics: digital soil assessment, digital soil modelling, operational soil mapping, soil and environmental covariates, soil sampling and monitoring and soil information modelling, artificial intelligence and cyber-infrastructure, and GlobalSoilMap. Digital soil assessments and beyond aims to encourage new mapping incentives and stimulate new ideas to make digital soil mapping practicable from local to national and ultimately global scales.