The Application Of 3S Technology In Soil Survey

After the foundation of New China, two nation-wide soil surveys have been carried out.Both surveys drew on the whole"forces"of national agriculture department and relatedindustries, revealing"the real situation"of our country soil. However, the traditional surveymethod is based on manual technique and large numbers of samples, which significantlyreduce the efficiency of soil survey. It also takes more time, thus bring a higher cost. Thereby,this traditional survey method cannot meet the requirements for the development of modernsociety and economy.In recent years, 3S technology has been developing rapidly. Compared with thetraditional survey method, this new technique greatly reduces the costs, takes less time, andincreases accuracy. Meanwhile, such a spatial information distribution platform which isbased on GIS technology provides a useful tool for the processing of geographicalinformation.Nowadays, many foreign countries have set up their nation-wide soil informationsystems and some others are just in the process of setting up their own. Canada is the firstcountry to have its soil system and America has also set up its own. Other countries, such asJapan and Australia, all have their nation-wide soil system. China began its soil informationresearch at a later stage and now it only has a limited database for soil information. We onlypossess a national soil and soil degradation map, in a proportion of 1:4,000,000. As we cansee, it is more and more urgent to set up a more detailed and standard national soil database.This paper, based on the last two soil surveys, proposes a new soil survey design thatdraws on 3S technology. In this design, this advanced technology is successfully applies toeach stage, compared with the last two surveys, this design fully shows the advantages of 3Stechnology. On the other hand, in such a 3S-based soil survey design, various key techniqueand thorny problems exist. Drawing on the soil information that was collected during thesecond national soil survey in Pingliang region, the author of this paper has made further experiments in this region. The current design collects samples from measuring points andcreates a pedological map. It has successfully solved the problems that exist in 3S-based soilsurvey programs, providing valuable support for the forthcoming third nation-wide soilsurvey.