IMPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL SOIL MAPPING FOR SOIL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Abstract Soil information systems (SIS) as we know them store information about the soil as point observations and maps. This may seem obvious and sensible, but in fact in the present time it is a suboptimal way of storing soil information. Nowadays soil maps are often derived using digital soil mapping models and this offers the possibility to store the models used to derive the maps, instead of the maps themselves. This short paper lists the advantages of storing models instead of maps and illustrates the approach with examples from SIS+, a prototype developed for the Netherlands