Anne Vascik's Graduate Defense Seminar

Anne Vascik, MS Candidate, Soil Science, will present Physiographic Mapping of Ohio’s Soil Systems as her Graduate Defense Seminar in 245 Kottman Hall.

Previous physiograpic soils mapping has focused on a top down approach and relied on existing soil survey data. This method is prone to the inherent flaws in these databases such as boundary edge conflicts and resolution. In order to address these issues a multi-scale bottom up approach based on soil forming factors was proposed. A case study of Northwest Ohio was selected because of the existence of geo-referenced soils data for future validation. Environmental covariates corresponding to the soil forming factors were generated across multiple scales. Terrain attributes were generated from a 30-meter resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) using the software SAGA. Other environmental covariates were soil parent material and quaternary geology. These layers where then introduced into the software eCognition by Trimble. eCogniton uses a hierarchical approach of object-based image analysis to generate image objects from multiple weighted image layers. The input layers were first segmented using multiresolution segmentation that minimized the local heterogeneity within the image objects. These image objects were then classified using a semi-supervised classification approach to generate a hierarchical classification of 11 soil systems for Northwest Ohio. These soil systems reflect not only the soil composition, but also the terrain attributes and geological history. The soil systems were then compared to existing soil and geological maps for the study area. These soil systems will in the future be used to map soil catenas with an end goal of disaggregation over a large area.