ValiDat.DSM, a new soil data validation dataset for Central Europe

Abstract

Digital soil maps are often derived using digital soil mapping tools, satellite imageries and digital terrain models as environmental covariates. Therefore several new datasets are raster based data representing soil classification categories, like WRB reference soil groups. Validating raster datasets with categorical data is not well researched and supported. No procedure and validation datasets exist that can take categorical diversity and similarity (taxonomic distance) into consideration. This approach would require an input validation dataset describing the categorical diversity of the spatial units to be validated. The aim of this study is to introduce a novel dataset developed for this purpose.