Estimation of Soil Characteristics from Multispectral Sentinel-3 Imagery and DEM Derivatives Using Machine Learning

In this paper, different machine learning methodologies have been evaluated for the estimation of the multiple soil characteristics of a continental-wide area corresponding to the European region, using multispectral Sentinel-3 satellite imagery and digital elevation model (DEM) derivatives. The results confirm the importance of multispectral imagery in the estimation of soil properties and specifically show that the use of DEM derivatives improves the quality of the estimates, in terms of R2, by about 19% on average. In particular, the estimation of soil texture increases by about 43%, and that of cation exchange capacity (CEC) by about 65%. The importance of each input source (multispectral and DEM) in predicting the soil properties using machine learning has been traced back. It has been found that, overall, the use of multispectral features is more important than the use of DEM derivatives with a ration, on average, of 60% versus 40%.