The development of digital models of the soil cover in the western part of Bol'shezemel'skaya tundra

The methods of digital mapping are promising for creating soil maps on difficultly accessible territories. This study was aimed at searching of optimal approaches for digital mapping of the soil cover in poorly studied western part of the Bol’shezemel’skaya tundra on different scales. Medium-scale (1 : 200 000) and small-scale (1 : 1 M) soil maps served as the source of initial information about soils of this region; actual information of the state of the territory was obtained from remote sensing data (Landsat 8 scenes, Aug. 14, 2013) and digital elevation model ASTER GDEM v.2. After extraction of information and the choice of predictors, the analysis of digital soil cover models obtained with the use of different algorithms - Random Forest (RF), Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) - was performed. The coefficient of agreement between the newly developed digital models and the initial paper-based soil maps (kappa) was calculated...