CyberSoLIM: A cyber platform for digital soil mapping

In recent years, new demands and trends have emerged in the digital soil mapping (DSM) field: the range of applications as well as the range of users has become much diverse. Users of DSM include not only experts in soil science community but also those from relevant domains (e.g., hydrology, ecology). In addition, the rapid expansion of areas for DSM and the ever increasing spatial resolution of covariates call for an accelerated level of computation. These new trends have raised the bar for DSM software platforms. This paper presents CyberSoLIM, a prototype system to illustrate an idea of easy-of-use and high performance enabled cyber environment for DSM. CyberSoLIM is implemented to have five main features: (1) heuristic modeling, which allows digital soil mappers to construct DSM workflow easily; (2) visualized modeling with which the conceptual workflow of DSM is expressed by graphic icons; (3) workflow reuse, which increases the efficiency of DSM deployment; (4) online execution and high-performance computing, which can use the advantage of cyber infrastructure and high-performance computing; and (5) web service enabled, which provides effective and easy means to share and integrate models and algorithms. As an illustration of such environment, CyberSoLIM was used to infer the silt content in topsoil (0–20cm) in China's Anhui Province. The case study confirms that software platform as illustrated by CyberSoLIM is easy to use and efficient in terms of mapping productivity.