Digital Soil Mapping of the Willamette National Forest.

Large (>1million ha) areas of National Forest land have outdated or incomplete soil maps.  Current plans to complete updated soil maps will take between several years to over a decade for a single forested area, and several decades for all of the forested areas.  Digital soil mapping (DSM) techniques are being implemented in an effort to increase the rate of mapping for each National Forest Land.  This project looks at methods for predicting soil series across the Willamette National Forest (WNF) based off of limited training data.  Training data will be used from two sources: NRCS preliminary map unit boundaries from ongoing mapping efforts, and point data collected across the entire WNF.  The sample points were generated using conditioned Latin Hypercube Sampling (cLHS) to capture the maximum range of characteristics for each environmental variable.  Training data sources will be compared to determine which sampling process is most conducive to this hybridized mapping process which combined traditional soil mapping with DSM to increase the speed of mapping large forested areas.