Graduate Exit Seminar

Jared Shaffer will present his Graduate Exit Seminar on Monday, July 8 at 2:00 p.m. in 460 Kottman Hall. His presentation is The Effects of spatial Resolution on Digital Soil Attribute Mapping.

Advances in sensing technologies are allowing analysts access to data with levels of detail ranging from I km to the sub-meter. With this wide availability of data the choice of an appropriate spatial resolution for any given application becomes more of a concern. It is known that spatial resolution of a digital elevation model has significant effects on the terrain parameters derived from it. Attempts have been made to develop quantitative methods which analyze an image’s spatial structure as resolution changes, with the goal of identifying an appropriate grid cell size. These studies have been primarily limited to geomorphological studies and hydrological modeling; however with the increase in digital soil mapping efforts, the issue of scale also needs to be considered in this discipline. Terrain attributes derived from digital elevation models and spectral reflectance bands from satellite imagery were used to study the effects of spatial resolution on the digital mapping of soil depth. Several multi-scale characterization methods were tested on the parameters used to model soil depth, and the accuracies of the subsequent maps were assessed. The overall objective of this work is to improve the methods of scale optimization for use in soil -landscape modeling.