Non-Algorithmically Integrating Land Use Type with Spatial Interpolation of Surface Soil Nutrients in an Urbanizing Watershed

Integrating land use type and other geographic information within spatial interpolation has been proposed as a solution to improve the performance and accuracy of soil nutrient mapping at the regional scale. This study developed a non-algorithm approach, i.e., applying inverse distance weighting (IDW) and ordinary kriging (OK), to individual land use types rather than to the whole watershed, to determine if this improved the performance in mapping soil total C (TC), total N (TN), and total P (TP) in a 200-km2 urbanizing watershed in Southeast China. Four land use types were identified by visual interpretation as forest land, agricultural land, green land, and urban land. One hundred and fifty soil samples (0-10 cm) were taken according to land use type and patch size. Results showed that the non-algorithm approach, interpolation based on individual land use types, substantially improved the performance of IDW and OK for mapping TC, TN, and TP in the watershed. Root mean square errors were reduced by 3.9% for TC, 10.7% for TN, and 25.9% for TP by the application of IDW, while the improvements by OK were slightly lower as 0.9% for TC, 7.7% for TN, and 18.1% for TP. Interpolations based on individual land use types visually improved depiction of spatial patterns for TC, TN, and TP in the watershed relative to interpolations by the whole watershed. Substantial improvements might be expected with denser sampling points. We suggest that this non-algorithm approach might provide an alternative to algorithm-based approaches to depict watershed-scale nutrient patterns.