Intersecting soil point observations with environmental covariates

In order to carry out digital soil mapping in terms of evaluating the significance of environmental variables in explaining the spatial variation of the target soil variable under investigation, we need to link both sets of data together and extract the values of the covariates at the locations of the soil point data.

The first task is to bring in to our working environment some soil point data. We will be using a data set of soil samples collected from the Hunter Valley, NSW Australia. The area in question is an approximately 22k**m2 sub-area of the Hunter Wine Country Private Irrigation District (HWCPID), situated in the Lower Hunter Valley, NSW (32.8329S,151.354E). The HWCPID is approximately 140 km north of Sydney, NSW, Australia. The target variable is soil pH. The data was preprocessed such that the predicted values are outputs of the mass-preserving depth function. You will find that most examples in this section and other sections of this course that this data set is used quite a bit. The data is loaded in from the ithir package with the following script:

library(ithir)
data(HV_subsoilpH)
str(HV_subsoilpH)

## 'data.frame':    506 obs. of  14 variables:
##  $X : num 340386 340345 340559 340483 340734 ... ##$ Y                       : num  6368690 6368491 6369168 6368740 6368964 ...
##  $pH60_100cm : num 4.47 5.42 6.26 8.03 8.86 ... ##$ Terrain_Ruggedness_Index: num  1.34 1.42 1.64 1.04 1.27 ...
##  $AACN : num 1.619 0.281 2.301 1.74 3.114 ... ##$ Landsat_Band1           : int  57 47 59 52 62 53 47 52 53 63 ...
##  $Elevation : num 103.1 103.7 99.9 101.9 99.8 ... ##$ Hillshading             : num  1.849 1.428 0.934 1.517 1.652 ...
##  $Light_insolation : num 1689 1701 1722 1688 1735 ... ##$ Mid_Slope_Positon       : num  0.876 0.914 0.844 0.848 0.833 ...
##  $MRVBF : num 3.85 3.31 3.66 3.92 3.89 ... ##$ NDVI                    : num  -0.143 -0.386 -0.197 -0.14 -0.15 ...
##  $TWI : num 17.5 18.2 18.8 18 17.8 ... ##$ Slope                   : num  1.79 1.42 1.01 1.49 1.83 ...


As you will note, there are 506 observations of soil pH. These data are associated with a spatial coordinate and also have associated environmental covariate data that have been intersected with the point data. The environmental covariates have been sourced from a digital elevation model and Landsat 7 satellite data. For the demonstration purposes of the exercise, we will firstly remove this already intersected data and start fresh - essentially this is an opportunity to recall earlier work on dataframe manipulation and indexing.

# round pH data to 2 decimal places
HV_subsoilpH$pH60_100cm <- round(HV_subsoilpH$pH60_100cm, 2)

HV_subsoilpH <- HV_subsoilpH[, 1:3]

HV_subsoilpH$id <- seq(1, nrow(HV_subsoilpH), by = 1) # re-arrange order of columns HV_subsoilpH <- HV_subsoilpH[, c(4, 1, 2, 3)] # Change names of coordinate columns names(HV_subsoilpH)[2:3] <- c("x", "y")  Also in the ithir package are a collection of rasters that correspond to environmental covariates that cover the extent of the just loaded soil point data. These can be loaded using the script: data(hunterCovariates_sub) hunterCovariates_sub ## class : RasterStack ## dimensions : 249, 210, 52290, 11 (nrow, ncol, ncell, nlayers) ## resolution : 25, 25 (x, y) ## extent : 338422.3, 343672.3, 6364203, 6370428 (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax) ## crs : +proj=utm +zone=56 +south +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs ## names : Terrain_Ruggedness_Index, AACN, Landsat_Band1, Elevation, Hillshading, Light_insolation, Mid_Slope_Positon, MRVBF, NDVI, TWI, Slope ## min values : 0.194371, 0.000000, 26.000000, 72.217499, 0.000677, 1236.662840, 0.000009, 0.000002, -0.573034, 8.224325, 0.001708 ## max values : 15.945321, 106.665482, 140.000000, 212.632507, 32.440960, 1934.199950, 0.956529, 4.581594, 0.466667, 20.393652, 21.809752  This data set is a stack of 11 rasterLayers which correspond to mainly indices derived from a digital elevation model: elevation(elevation), terrain wetness index (TWI), altitude above channel network (AACN), terrain ruggedness index (Terrain_Ruggedness_Index), hillshading (Hillshading), incoming solar radiation (Light_insolation), mid-slope position (Mid_Slope_Positon), multi-resolution valley bottom flatness index (MRVBF), and slope gradient (Slope). Landsat 7 satellite spectral data, specifically band 1 (Landsat_Band1} and normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) are provided too, and give some indication of the spatial variation of vegetation patterns across the study area. You may notice that there is a commonality between these rasterlayers in terms of their CRS, dimensions and resolution. When you have multiple rasterlayers as individual rasters, but they are common to each other in terms of resolution and extent, rather than working with each raster independently it is much more efficient to stack them all into a single object. The stack function from the raster package is ready-made for this, of which the hunterCovariates_sub stack is an output. This harmony is an ideal situation for DSM where there may often be instances where rasters from the some area under investigation may have different resolutions, extents and even CRSs. It these situations it is common to reproject and or resample to a common projection and resolution. The functions from the raster package which may be of use in these situations are projectRaster and resample. The Reprojections, resampling and rasterisation page takes you through a number of different scenarios and workflows using these functions and others. While the example is a little contrived, it is useful to always determine whether or not the available covariates have complete coverage of the soil point data. This might be done with the following script which will produce a map like in the figure below. # plot raster plot(hunterCovariates_sub[["Elevation"]], main = "Hunter Valley elevation map with overlayed point locations") ## plot points coordinates(HV_subsoilpH) <- ~x + y plot(HV_subsoilpH, add = T)  With the soil point data and covariates prepared, it is time to perform the intersection between the soil observations and covariate layers using the script: coordinates(HV_subsoilpH) <- ~x + y DSM_data <- extract(x = hunterCovariates_sub, y = HV_subsoilpH, sp = 1, method = "simple")  The extract function is quite useful. Essentially the function ingests the rasterStack object, together with the SpatialPointsDataFrame object HV_subsoilpH. The sp parameter set to 1 means that the extracted covariate data gets appended to the existing SpatialPointsDataFrame object. While the method object specifies the extraction method which in our case is simple which likened to get the covariate value nearest to the points i.e it is likened to drilling down. A good practice is to then export the soil and covariate data intersect object to file for later use. First we convert the spatial object to a data.frame, then export as a comma separated file. DSM_data <- as.data.frame(DSM_data) write.csv(DSM_data, "hunterValley_SoilCovariates_pH.csv", row.names = FALSE)  In the previous example the rasters we wanted to use are available data from the ithir package. More generally we will have the raster data we need sitting on our computer, a USB or even on the cloud somewhere. The steps for intersecting the soil observation data with the covariates are the same as before, except we now need to specify the location where our raster covariate data is located. We need not even have to load in the rasters to memory, just point R to where they are, and then run the raster extract function. This utility is obviously a very handy feature when we are dealing with an inordinately large or large number of rasters. The workhorse function we need is list.files. First you will need to download the testGrids.zip folder, and unzip them into a directory of your choosing. Now try the following script: list.files(path = "~/testGrids", pattern = "\\.tif$", full.names = TRUE)

##  [1] "~/AACN.tif"
##  [2] "~/Elevation.tif"
##  [4] "~/Landsat_Band1.tif"
##  [5] "~/Light_insolation.tif"
##  [6] "~/Mid_Slope_Positon.tif"
##  [7] "~/MRVBF.tif"
##  [8] "~/NDVI.tif"
##  [9] "~/Slope.tif"
## [10] "~/Terrain_Ruggedness_Index.tif"
## [11] "~/TWI.tif"


The parameter path is essentially the directory location where the raster files are sitting. If needed, we may also want to do recursive listing into directories that are within that path directory. We want list.files() to return all the files (in our case) that have the .tif extension. This criteria is set via the pattern parameter, such that $ at the end means that this is end of string, and but adding \\. ensures that you match only files with extension .tif, otherwise it may list (if they exist), files that end in .atif as an example. You may guess that any other type of pattern matching criteria could be used to suit your own specific data. The full.names logical parameter is just a question of whether we want to return the full pathway address of the raster file, in which case, we do. All we then need to do is perform a raster stack of these individual rasters, then perform the intersection. This is really the handy feature where to perform the stack, we still need not require the loading of the rasters into the R memory. They are still on file!. files <- list.files(path = "~/testGrids", pattern = "\\.tif$", full.names = TRUE)

# stack rasters
r1 <- raster(files[1])
for (i in 2:length(files)) {
r1 <- stack(r1, files[i])}
r1

## class      : RasterStack
## dimensions : 249, 210, 52290, 11  (nrow, ncol, ncell, nlayers)
## resolution : 25, 25  (x, y)
## extent     : 338422.3, 343672.3, 6364203, 6370428  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
## crs        : +proj=utm +zone=56 +south +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0
## names      :        AACN,   Elevation, Hillshading, Landsat_Band1, Light_insolation, Mid_Slope_Positon,       MRVBF,        NDVI,       Slope, Terrain_Ruggedness_Index,         TWI
## min values :    0.000000,   72.217499,    0.000677,     26.000000,      1236.662840,          0.000009,    0.000002,   -0.573034,    0.001708,                 0.194371,    8.224325
## max values :  106.665482,  212.632507,   32.440960,    140.000000,      1934.199950,          0.956529,    4.581594,    0.466667,   21.809752,                15.945321,   20.393652


Note that the stacking of rasters can only be possible if they are all equivalent in terms of resolution and extent. The Reprojections, resampling and rasterisation page takes you through a number of different scenarios and workflows for getting your data layers all harmonised. With the stacked rasters, we can perform the soil point data intersection as done previously.

DSM_data <- extract(r1, HV_subsoilpH, sp = 1, method = "simple")

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