Modeling Soil Organic Carbon Changes Using Signal-To-Noise Analysis: A Case Study Using European Soil Survey Datasets

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a key indicator of soil health and a crucial component of climate mitigation, making its reliable monitoring increasingly important. While Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) based on Machine Learning and Earth Observation (EO) data enables the generation of time series of spatially explicit SOC predictions, detecting temporal changes from these model predictions remains challenging due to the relatively large associated uncertainties. Although prediction uncertainties are now commonly reported, few studies have explicitly accounted for them when assessing SOC change. This study introduces a model-based signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) framework to assess the detectability of SOC change using both the state-first approach-modeling SOC states at each time point and then deriving change-and the change-first approach-modeling SOC change directly from repeated measurements. SNR is defined as the ratio of predicted SOC (concentration, g/kg) change to its modeled uncertainty, enabling evaluation of change-model reliability at pixel levels. Applied to repeated SOC observations from the pan-European Land Use and Coverage Area Frame Survey, this framework assesses the reliability of SOC change modeling across multiple land-cover types using Random Forest and Quantile Regression Forests. At the site level, prediction accuracy was poor and SNR values were consistently low. An illustrative aggregation analysis showed that spatial averaging improved SNR, supporting SOC change assessments at broader scales. However, further work is needed to incorporate land use and management information and to systematically examine how different aggregation schemes affect the results in various contexts, ensuring that aggregated outcomes remain meaningful and policy-relevant. As an internal metric based on model predictions and their estimated uncertainty, SNR provides a practical diagnostic of change-model confidence, especially when repeated ground-truth SOC measurements are not available. We advocate for routine SNR reporting to enhance the transparency and credibility of DSM-based SOC change monitoring.