Chapter 11 — Question 3

Why is it necessary to have a sound conceptual model of how soils form in the landscape

to apply the aerial photo-interpretation method presented in Section ??? What are the
advantages of this approach in terms of efficiency and thematic accuracy, compared to
interpretation element(only) analysis?

Answer

A sound conceptual model of how soils form in the landscape is necessary, since
we can’t usually see soil types in a very clear way in the image. E.g. soils are
covered by vegetation and other land-cover classes. Since there are models that
relate landscape, topography, lithology etc. to soils, we use these to get a better
international result.

In terms of efficiency and thematic accuracy, this ’conceptual model’ ap-

proach is more efficient and accurate than the one using only interpretation ele-
ments. It uses additional information (like this model), a hierarchical scheme
and some samples from the field for validation and for ambiguous areas in the
image (where different soil types look the same).

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