Advancing spatial prediction of soil properties using remotely sensed data and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI): Challenges, opportunities, and future directions

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About this Research Topic

Submission deadlines

  1. Manuscript Submission Deadline 15 July 2025

  2. This Research Topic is still accepting articles.

Background

The spatial prediction of soil properties is a critical component of precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and land management. Remotely sensed data and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) techniques offer promising avenues for improving the accuracy, efficiency, and scalability of soil property mapping.

In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on the use of remotely sensed data for soil property mapping. Remotely sensed data can provide a wealth of information about soil properties, such as vegetation indices, land surface temperature, and soil moisture. This information can be used to train machine learning models to predict soil properties.

GeoAI techniques, such as deep learning, can be used to extract complex patterns from remotely sensed data. This can improve the accuracy of soil property predictions. Additionally, GeoAI techniques can be used to integrate remotely sensed data with other sources of information, such as soil survey data and environmental data. This can further improve the accuracy and completeness of soil property maps.

Despite the progress that has been made, there are still a number of challenges associated with the use of remotely sensed data and GeoAI for soil property mapping. These challenges include:

The need for high-quality training data: Machine learning models require high-quality training data to achieve accurate results. However, collecting soil property data is time-consuming and expensive.

The need for robust models: Soil properties are influenced by a complex set of factors. Machine learning models need to be robust enough to account for this complexity.

The need for interpretable models: It is important to be able to interpret the results of machine learning models. This is necessary to ensure that the models are making reliable predictions.

Despite these challenges, the use of remotely sensed data and GeoAI is conducive to soil property mapping. In the future, we can expect to see more research on the use of these techniques for soil property mapping. Additionally, we can expect to see the development of new GeoAI techniques that are specifically designed for soil property mapping.

We are inviting submissions of papers that address the challenges, opportunities, and future directions of using remotely sensed data and GeoAI for spatial prediction of soil properties. Papers can address a wide range of topics, including:

The development of new GeoAI techniques for soil property mapping

The application of GeoAI techniques to specific soil properties

The integration of remotely sensed data with other sources of information for soil property mapping

The challenges and opportunities of using GeoAI for soil property mapping

The future directions of GeoAI for soil property mapping

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Keywords: Soil properties, remote sensing, machine learning, geospatial artificial intelligence, spatial prediction, digital soil mapping, precision agriculture, environmental sustainability

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