Soil property monitoring is useful for sustainable agricultural production and environmental modeling. It is possible to automatically predict soil properties in a wide range based on remote sensing images. Heihe River Basin was chosen as the research area. Measurements on three soil properties, which were pH, organic carbon, and bulk density, were available there. Two kinds of attributes were extracted, which were the remote sensing index and terrain attributes. The prediction models were constructed by random forest algorithms. The features were determined by combining correlation statistics with prediction error, and different features were selected for each of the three properties. The validation experimental results are presented. The error results were as follows: pH (MAE = 0.28, RMSE = 0.39, R2 = 0.41), organic carbon (MAE = 4.75, RMSE = 8.26, R2 = 0.75), and bulk density (MAE = 0.11, RMSE = 0.13, R2 = 0.70). Through the analysis and comparison of the experimental results, it was proven that the algorithm in this paper had a good performance in the prediction of organic carbon and bulk density.
Changes in soil organic carbon in the upper Heihe river basin, China