Soil Grids of Victorian Total Organic Carbon %

Brief description

A set of Digital Soil Maps (mean, 5th and 95th percentile prediction values) of total organic carbon % across Victoria in geotiff format.

Grids of key soil properties have been produced for Victoria. These grids, in raster format, provide prediction and confidence interval values for key soil properties at a 90 m grid resolution for six set depths; 0 to 5 cm, 5 to 15 cm, 15 to 30 cm, 30 to 60 cm, 60 to 100 cm and 100 to 200 cm, across Victoria. In the case of Total Organic Carbon % mapping, prediction maps from only the first three depths have been published due to poor model validation for the lower three depths. This is in part due to the shoartage of calibration data available for modelling at these depths.

The grids have been designed to meet the specifications created by GlobalSoilMap (www.globalsoilmap.net) to develop and deliver detailed soil information in a consistent form.

The grids are a spatial interpolation of key soil properties to support modelling and decision making in resource management, agricultural production, land use policy and planning, and in further research such as ecosystem modelling.

The methodology used to develop the Soil Grids of Victoria has been based on that refined by the Australian Soil and Landscape Grid. Data and knowledge embedded into existing soil related datasets, e.g. soil profile and land mapping collections, have been key inputs.

Whilst the new maps show an immense amount of fine scale detail, and are our best spatially continuous and exhaustive estimates of soil attributes across all of Victoria, they are most appropriately used for assessments of regional to state-wide trends of soil properties and their relationship with their environment and pedogenesis. Care should be taken when using the grids for local assessments and it is recommended that the confidence intervals are included at this scale.