The medical sciences have implemented it for microorganism characterization and genomics, engineering sciences for pattern recognition, and information and decision sciences for investment and economic research. In earth sciences, it is used for earthquake detection and land use patterns. Social sciences has applied classification for behavior patterns and culture analysis. Classification has been used in biology for numerical taxonomy and cladistics. ![]() It was advances in computer technology and formalization of classification techniques that led to modern unsupervised learning techniques such as cluster analysis. There were attempts by Mendeleyev in the 1860s and Zubin in 1938 to use classification outside biology, but it was in the mid-20th century when the application of classification expanded rapidly. Taxonomy or classification of plants and animals has been traced back to the early Greeks and Romans and was later codified by Linnaeus in the Genera Plantarum in 1737. The organization of objects into classes is a fundamental exercise at the core of many scientific fields. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedicationĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: Funding was provided by the Phoenix Chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation (ARCS), Inc., (DGG) and through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) Terrestrial Ecology Program, Award #NNH09ZDA001N, (DGG, KRT). This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: June 29, 2015 NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, UNITED KINGDOM The ease with which hydrologic-process-based classifications can be made, along with the improved quantitative predictions of soil responses and visualization of landscape function, suggest that hydrologic-process-based classifications should be incorporated into environmental process models and can be used to define application-specific maps of hydrologic function.Ĭitation: Groenendyk DG, Ferré TP, Thorp KR, Rice AK (2015) Hydrologic-Process-Based Soil Texture Classifications for Improved Visualization of Landscape Function. The spatial patterns of hydrologic response were more immediately informative, much simpler, and less ambiguous, for use in applications ranging from trafficability to irrigation management to flood control. We then developed a QGIS plugin to construct soil maps combining a classification with georeferenced soil data from the Natural Resource Conservation Service. Differences in classifications based on hydrologic response versus soil texture demonstrate that traditional soil texture classification is a poor predictor of hydrologic response. The hydrologic-process-based classifications were compared to those based on soil texture and a single hydraulic property, K s. Using a k-means clustering algorithm, we created soil classifications based on the modeled hydrologic responses of these soils. We consider these common conditions to be: drainage from saturation, infiltration onto a drained soil, and combined infiltration and drainage events. Hydrologic simulations based on common meteorological conditions were performed using HYDRUS-1D, spanning textures identified by the United States Department of Agriculture soil texture triangle. We suggest a new approach to soil classification, with a detailed example from the science of hydrology. Here, we show that these traditional soil classifications can be inappropriate, contributing to bias and uncertainty in applications from slope stability to water resource management. These readily available, georeferenced soil maps and databases are used widely in environmental sciences. There is a long-established convention for identifying and mapping soils by texture. Soils lie at the interface between the atmosphere and the subsurface and are a key component that control ecosystem services, food production, and many other processes at the Earth’s surface.
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