Impact of Land Cover Changes on Soil Type Mapping in Plain Areas: Evidence from Tongzhou District of Beijing, China

Abstract

The flat terrain in the plain areas of Beijing, China makes the land easily accessible for cultivation and farming, providing vast opportunities for agricultural development. Meanwhile, these areas are also crucial for urban construction and economic growth. Soil type mapping plays a key role in understanding soil characteristics and guiding land management practices. However, accurately mapping soil types in plain regions can be challenging due to their low spatial variability and diverse land use types. Although land cover changes due to phenomena such as urbanization, agricultural expansion, and conversion of natural vegetation can significantly affect soil properties and distribution patterns, their impacts on soil type mapping remain unclear. This study investigated the impacts of land cover changes in plain areas on the accuracy of soil type mapping, hoping to provide effective assistance for soil type mapping in plain areas by analyzing their coupling relationship. Focusing on the 20 year land cover changes in Tongzhou District, this study utilizes a unified approach that combines expert knowledge, mixed sampling methods, and RF mapping techniques, while incorporating environmental covariates that have minimal period influence and synergistically using NDVI and land cover data from the same year. Transition matrices are used to reveal land cover changes, confusion matrices, and their derived indicators to analyze changes in soil type mapping accuracy, and coupling analysis is conducted between soil type change areas and land cover change areas. The results show that Tongzhou District has experienced rapid development over the past 20 years, with the area of construction land nearly doubling. Additionally, 29% of arable land has been converted into construction land, resulting in an increase in the accuracy of the soil map from 58.99% to 66.91% over the 20 year period. The soil type change area during this period accounts for 16.5% of the total area, with 51.9% of the changed areas overlapping with land cover change areas. These overlapping regions are predominantly influenced by human activities. In terms of cultivated land types in the study area, the quantity of arable land has decreased by approximately 29% over 20 years, while the proportion of Sandy loam calcareous fluvo-aquic soil and Light loam calcareous fluvo-aquic soil, which constitute nearly half of the soil type, has increased. These data demonstrate the coupling relationship between land cover changes and soil type variations. It is evident that improving the extent of land use in plain areas enhances the credibility of soil type mapping. Meanwhile, human activities impact land cover, which, in turn, affects and reflects changes in the soil type.