Soil Projects > SOTER(Soil Terrain Database) > Model Techniques
In order to better understand this section, it is recommended to read carefully the section "Model Description".
How to get the raw SOTER units
The combination of the 4 different layers (Slope, Hypsometry, Relief Intensity , PDD) as shown below:
can produce the raw SOTER physiographic units:
Vector based generalization procedure
Find below the necessary steps in the process of generating SOTER physiographic units:
- Select polygons under the minimum size limit
- Apply the minimum Euclidean distance method:
- Calculate the 4 mean terrain variables for each polygon
- Calculate the Euclidean distance for each polygon pairs
- Merge each selected small polygon into its neighbour having the smallest Euclidean distance
- After eliminating small polygons
- Simplify the lines as shown in the following figure:
- 0.2 mm separability distance between features on the printout
- Displacement of the vertices with maximum 200 and 1000 m ground units
respectively for the 1:1 and 1:5 million scales
The resulting 1:5 million SOTER physiographic units:
Conclusions
Some conclusions have been produced till now:
- There is a strong need for standardized, quantitative data based methodologies to derive soil-landscape information at specified levels of resolution.
- The 90 m resolution SRTM DEM is a promising data source for 1/1 down to 1/5 million scale soilscape delineation.
- The procedure can be translated to a purely quantitative manner, maintaining all the advantages of the quantitaive approaches.
- However, some criteria had to be modified to meet the needs of a DEM-derived approach, like Relief and PDD.
In the following figure you can view the comparison of generalisation of SOTER physiographic units in two different scales; one more detailed (Scale 1:1,000,000 - Color: red) and another less detailed (Scale 1: 5,000,000 - Color: yellow). Also the raw physiographic units are in blue color:
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