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Main Authors: Lin, Yijun, Chen, Theresa, Brungard, Colby, Sabine, Grunwald, Ives, Sue, Macander, Matt, Nawrocki, Timm, Chiang, Yao-Yi, Jelinski, Nic
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17302
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author Lin, Yijun
Chen, Theresa
Brungard, Colby
Sabine, Grunwald
Ives, Sue
Macander, Matt
Nawrocki, Timm
Chiang, Yao-Yi
Jelinski, Nic
author_facet Lin, Yijun
Chen, Theresa
Brungard, Colby
Sabine, Grunwald
Ives, Sue
Macander, Matt
Nawrocki, Timm
Chiang, Yao-Yi
Jelinski, Nic
contents Fine-scale soil mapping in Alaska, traditionally relying on fieldwork and localized simulations, remains a critical yet underdeveloped task, despite the region's ecological importance and extensive permafrost coverage. As permafrost thaw accelerates due to climate change, it threatens infrastructure stability and key ecosystem services, such as soil carbon storage. High-resolution soil maps are essential for characterizing permafrost distribution, identifying vulnerable areas, and informing adaptation strategies. We present MISO, a vision-based machine learning (ML) model to produce statewide fine-scale soil maps for near-surface permafrost and soil taxonomy. The model integrates a geospatial foundation model for visual feature extraction, implicit neural representations for continuous spatial prediction, and contrastive learning for multimodal alignment and geo-location awareness. We compare MISO with Random Forest (RF), a traditional ML model that has been widely used in soil mapping applications. Spatial cross-validation and regional analysis across Permafrost Zones and Major Land Resource Areas (MLRAs) show that MISO generalizes better to remote, unseen locations and achieves higher recall than RF, which is critical for monitoring permafrost thaw and related environmental processes. These findings demonstrate the potential of advanced ML approaches for fine-scale soil mapping and provide practical guidance for future soil sampling and infrastructure planning in permafrost-affected landscapes. The project will be released at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/Peatland-permafrost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17302
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-Scale Soil Mapping in Alaska with Multimodal Machine Learning
Lin, Yijun
Chen, Theresa
Brungard, Colby
Sabine, Grunwald
Ives, Sue
Macander, Matt
Nawrocki, Timm
Chiang, Yao-Yi
Jelinski, Nic
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Fine-scale soil mapping in Alaska, traditionally relying on fieldwork and localized simulations, remains a critical yet underdeveloped task, despite the region's ecological importance and extensive permafrost coverage. As permafrost thaw accelerates due to climate change, it threatens infrastructure stability and key ecosystem services, such as soil carbon storage. High-resolution soil maps are essential for characterizing permafrost distribution, identifying vulnerable areas, and informing adaptation strategies. We present MISO, a vision-based machine learning (ML) model to produce statewide fine-scale soil maps for near-surface permafrost and soil taxonomy. The model integrates a geospatial foundation model for visual feature extraction, implicit neural representations for continuous spatial prediction, and contrastive learning for multimodal alignment and geo-location awareness. We compare MISO with Random Forest (RF), a traditional ML model that has been widely used in soil mapping applications. Spatial cross-validation and regional analysis across Permafrost Zones and Major Land Resource Areas (MLRAs) show that MISO generalizes better to remote, unseen locations and achieves higher recall than RF, which is critical for monitoring permafrost thaw and related environmental processes. These findings demonstrate the potential of advanced ML approaches for fine-scale soil mapping and provide practical guidance for future soil sampling and infrastructure planning in permafrost-affected landscapes. The project will be released at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/Peatland-permafrost.
title Fine-Scale Soil Mapping in Alaska with Multimodal Machine Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17302