Soil Salinity Sampling Strategy Using Spatial Modeling Techniques, Remote Sensing, and Field Data

The aim of this study was to develop a methodology for collecting soil salinity samples. The objectives of this paper are to: (1) estimate the number of soil salinity samples needed to capture the variability in the soil salinity data with high accuracy; and (2) compare two types of satellite images with different resolutions: Ikonos with 4 m resolution and Landsat 5 with 30 m resolution. To achieve these objectives, two satellite images were acquired (one for Ikonos and one for Landsat 5) to evaluate the correlation between the measured soil salinity and remote sensing data. From the observed data, three subsets were randomly extracted with each subset containing: 75, 50, and 25% of the data for each field. These three subsets were then used in the modeling process. Ordinary least squares (OLS) (i.e., multiple regression) was used to explore the coarse-scale variability in soil salinity as a function of the Ikonos and Landsat 5 bands. A stepwise procedure was used to identify the best subset of satellite bands to include in the regression models that minimized the Akakie information criteria (AIC). Then, the spatial structure of the residuals from the OLS models were described using sample variogram models. The variogram model with the smallest AIC was selected to describe the spatial dependencies in the soil salinity data. If the residuals were spatially correlated, ordinary kriging was used to model the spatial distribution of soil salinity in the fields. A tenfold cross validation was used to estimate the prediction error for soil salinity. To evaluate the effectiveness of the models, various measures of the prediction error were computed. This study provides an accurate methodology that can be used by researchers in reducing the number of soil samples that need to be collected. This is especially valuable in projects that last several years. The results of this study suggest that the number of soil samples that need to be collected and therefore their cost can be significantly reduced and soil salinity estimation can be significantly improved by using kriging. The results also show that the Ikonos image performed better than the Landsat 5 image.