THE SCALE PROBLEM IN MODERN SOIL MAPPING

Abstract

One of the features of the transition from traditional soil cartography to digital technologies for compiling and using soil maps is a qualitative change in both the concept of “map” and the concept of “map scale”. A map in digital cartography is a spatially coordinated database that can consist of many layers of information and can be visualized at any scale. The scale of traditionally compiled paper soil maps is of great importance for understanding the semantic load of the map and the degree of its generalization. When using digital soil mapping, the concept of “scale” loses its meaning. This happens because the level of generalization of soil information in this case is not determined by the scale at which the map is visualized on the computer monitor or printed, but by what pixel size the map was created (in the case of raster maps) or which map served the basis for creating a vector layer of the soil map. For raster soil maps it is more logical to use the concept of “pixel size” instead of “scale”. For vector soil maps it is more important to indicate the scale of the original soil map (which was vectorized), rather than the scale of their visualization. The scale of visualization of the digital soil map is not important in the computer (digital) applied analysis of soil data. When creating raster soil maps, it is impossible to use source materials of different scales without bringing them to a unified level of generalization. All this must be taken into account when using digital soil mapping technology.