Construction of land surface dynamic feedback for digital soil mapping considering the spatial heterogeneity of rainfall magnitude

The land surface dynamic feedback (LSDF) information captured by time-series remote sensing data during the soil-drying process after a rainfall event provides effective covariates for digital soil mapping over low-relief areas. However, current methods used to capture LSDF require a uniform rainfall magnitude in the geographic space; a condition that is not often met for large areas. Here, we propose a LSDF construction method considering the spatial heterogeneity of rainfall magnitudes by adjusting the evaporation variables in the LSDF. For this, the relationships between evaporation and rainfall magnitudes were first established. The LSDFs from various locations for rainfall events with different magnitudes were then adjusted based on these relationships. Using a case study, the adjusted LSDFs after two rainfall events were then used to predict soil texture over a low-relief area. The results showed that the cubic polynomial model performed best when constructing the relationship between evaporation adjustment and rainfall magnitude, giving the highest R² value and a low Akaike information criterion. Adjustment to the LSDF decreases with increasing rainfall and the rate of change in the adjustment also decreases with increasing rainfall. For both rainfall events, prediction accuracies with the adjusted LSDFs were higher than those based on the original LSDFs. Furthermore, the greater the adjustment, the greater the improvement in the accuracy. We conclude that the proposed construction method for LSDF, accounting for the spatial heterogeneity of rainfall magnitudes, offers improved predictive power for digital soil mapping over large areas.