Spatiotemporal Assessment of Soil Organic Carbon Change Using Machine-Learning in Arid Regions

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an essential property of soil, and understanding its spatial patterns is critical to understanding vegetation management, soil degradation, and environmental issues. This study applies a framework using remote sensing data and digital soil mapping techniques to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of SOC for the Yazd-Ardakan Plain, Iran, from 1986 to 2016. Here, a conditioned Latin hypercube sampling method was used to select 201 sampling sites. A set of 37 environmental predictors were obtained from Landsat imagery taken in 1986, 1999, 2010 and 2016. Here, SOC was modeled for 2016 using the Random Forest (RF), support vector regression (SVR), and artificial neural networks (ANN) machine-learners by correlating environmental predictors with soil data. The results showed that RF yielded the highest accuracy (R-2 = 0.53), compared to the other two learners. By performing a variable importance analysis of the RF model, normalized difference vegetation index, modified vegetation index, and ground-adjusted vegetation index were determined to be the most important environmental predictors. By applying the model calibrated from 2016 data to 1986, 1999 and 2010, the results showed a substantial decrease in SOC; these decreases in SOC were mainly attributed to land use changes and agricultural activities.