Abstract:
Objective The aim was to improve the spatial prediction accuracy of soil pH in small watersheds and to establish an efficient and accurate spatial prediction model for soil pH.
Method Total 137 soil surface samples of 0 ~ 20 cm were collected in the Quxi small watershed of Fuling district, Chongqing, and their pH values were measured. Combining 16 key environmental factors, 70% of the samples were randomly selected as the training set. The hyperparameters of the random forest (RF) were optimized by the strategy of integrating the chicken swarm optimization (CSO) and the sparrow search algorithm (SSA). Six soil pH spatial prediction models, namely Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Ordinary Kriging (OK), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Random Forest for optimization of Sparrow search algorithm (SSA-RF), and Random Forest for optimization of Chicken Sparrow Search Algorithm (CSSA-RF), were constructed. And 30% of the samples were used as the test set to evaluate the model accuracy, with mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and Lin’s coordinated correlation coefficient (CCC) as the evaluation indicators of the model accuracy.
Result The RMSE ranking of the six soil pH space prediction methods on the test set was CSSA-RF < SSA-RF < RF < SVM <OK < MLR, and the ranking of MAE was SVM < RF < CSSA-RF < SSA-RF <OK < MLR. The sorting of CCC was CSSA-RF > SSA-RF > SVM > RF > OK > MLR, and the sorting of R2 was CSSA-RF > SSA-RF > RF > SVM > OK > MLR. Among them, the CSSA-RF model demonstrated the best prediction accuracy and generalization ability. The RMSE, MAE, CCC and R2 of its test set were 0.3563, 0.2923 and 0.8828 and 0.8142 respectively, and the prediction accuracy of the model was the highest.
Conclusion At the small watershed scale with sparse soil sample point density, the CSSA-RF model supplemented with environmental covariates has the highest spatial prediction accuracy of soil pH and better prediction performance than other unoptimized models.