Menace or Opportunity? – Uncertainty in Digital Soil Mapping and Modeling.

Digital soil mapping and modeling (DSMM) has been widely used to generate and represent spatial soil information. The importance of explicit uncertainty assessment has been recognized in the DSMM community, specifically in large-scale projects, such as the Global Soil Map. Based on an extensive literature review of research in DSMM and spatial modeling in general, we present an overview of various aspects of uncertainty assessment in DSMM, including: 1) sources of uncertainty and error budget analysis, 2) methodologies for uncertainty analysis), 3) model validation/verification, and 4) applications of uncertainty information in soil/environmental risk assessments. We also present two case studies at regional and sub-continental scales: 1) soil organic carbon in Florida and 2) soil organic carbon in the conterminous U.S. The aim of this talk is to promote the applications of uncertainty assessment in DSMM and spark fruitful discussion on this topic.