The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) Digital Soil Mapping Project.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) resides in the Superior National Forest in Northern Minnesota. The area is approximately 1.1 million acres, extending along the Minnesota and Canada border. The landscape is a complex mosaic of four soil parent materials; namely Rainy Lobe Till, lacustrine Agassiz sediments, outwash deposits and organic deposits. Soil drainage classes range from well-drained to ponded, and soil depth classes range from bedrock exposures to very deep deposits. Access to most of the project area is restricted to foot and paddle access only. A digital soil mapping project for the BWCA began in late 2012. Training data was collected during the 2013 field season. Several digital soil mapping approaches were employed and evaluated to create raster-based soil class maps including; unsupervised and supervised classification, knowledge-based classification and regression trees, logistic regression, random forests, and expert, heads-up digitizing. Eleven soil classes were mapped using these approaches. During the summer of 2014 validation points were collected in the field for an accuracy assessment and to instruct the possibilities for post-processing and delivery of the final raster product. Accuracies are currently being evaluated and preliminary results indicate an overall accuracy (and khat) that varies from 0.71 (0.67) to 0.53 (0.48) depending on the input parameters.