Mapping Haiti Soils By Combining Traditional and Digital Soil Mapping Techniques.

Soil is an important natural resource yet for many countries including Haiti, there is only a general soil map at 1:250,000 scale which is not suitable for management planning at the farm level. Given the high cost of conducting a traditional soil survey, we combined digital and traditional mapping techniques to save time and reduce costs. The acquisition of high resolution spatial data such as LiDAR, elevation, and satellite imagery combined, with new spatial analysis software and techniques, allows for an efficient and less expensive means of completing a soil survey. An initial soil survey was conducted for 3000 ha based on a combination of traditional and digital soil mapping techniques. Terrain analysis using Slope, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), and Curvature based on LiDAR elevation data was used to generate the preliminary soil map. Approximately 93 soil sites out of the 150 that were generated based on conditional Latin Hypercube Sampling (cLHC), were described and 13 of them were collected for full laboratory analysis. The preliminary soil map based on terrain analysis was updated based on the new soil information. Terrain attributes were not completely able to predict the soil patterns observed in the field, especially in the floodplains. The combination of cLHC and terrain analysis allowed for a more efficient field sampling campaign and provided better training support.