Confidence of suitability data for the FGARA project

Confidence of suitability data for the FGARA project

The Mahalanobis distance is a raster dataset used to report a reliability measure of the prediction of the land suitability data of the FGARA project (Mahalanobis, 1936). The Mahalanobis distance is a generalised distance function that measures how similar samples are based on their covariate information and has been used to assess prediction relia... morebility in the context of land suitability prediction (adapted from Sanderman et al., 2011). In this application it is used to represent the spatial covariate information at a given point in the landscape. If a point in the catchment is very similar to regions that were sampled then the model predictions for that point will be more reliable. This raster data represents a modelled surface of values representing distance from known and covariate data. The value range is from 4 - 116 with lower values representing a higher confidence and higher values representing a lower confidence in the suitability data. Processing information is contained in Python scripts (not supplied). The project is described in: Bartley R, Thomas MF, Clifford D, Phillip S, Brough D, Harms D, Willis R, Gregory L, Glover M, Moodie K, Sugars M, Eyre L, Smith DJ, Hicks W and Petheram C (2013) Land suitability: technical methods. A technical report to the Australian Government for the Flinders and Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment (FGARA) project, CSIRO. References: Mahalanobis PC (1936) On the generalised distance in statistics. Proceedings of the National Institute of Sciences of India 2(1), 49-55. Sanderman J, Baldock J, Hawke B, Macdonald L, Massis-Puccini A and Szarvas S (2011) National Soil Carbon Research Programme: Field and laboratory methodologies. CSIRO Sustainable Agriculture Flagship. less

Agricultural Land Management ;  Agricultural Land Planning ;  Agricultural Spatial Analysis and Modelling

https://doi.org/10.4225/08/530418128EBF2

01 Sep 2013

FGARA ;  AGRICULTURE ;  Australia ;  Queensland ;  SOIL ;  land suitability

This Mahalanobis reliability data has been created from a range of inputs and processing steps. Below is an overview. For more information refer to the CSIRO FGARA published reports and in particular ‘Land suitability: technical methods. A technical report to the Australian Government for the Flinders and Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment’. Broadly, the steps were to: 1. Collate existing data (data related to: climate, topography, soils, natural resources, remotely sensed etc. of various formats; reports, spatial vector, spatial raster etc.) 2. Select additional soil and attribute site data by Latin hypercube statistical sampling method applied across the covariate space 3. Carry out fieldwork to collect additional soil and attribute data and understand geomorphology and landscapes 4. Build models from selected input data and covariate data using predictive learning via rule ensembles in the RuleFit3 software 5. Create Mahalanobis distance (Mahalanobis, 1936)

This work was prepared for the Office of Northern Australia in the Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development under the North Queensland Irrigated Agriculture Strategy <http://www.regional.gov.au/regional/ona/nqis.aspx>. The Strategy is a collaborative initiative between the Office of Northern Australia, the Queensland Government and CSIRO. One part of the Strategy is the Flinders and Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment, which was led by CSIRO. Important aspects of the Assessment were undertaken by the Queensland Government and TropWATER (James Cook University).

CSIRO Data Licence

CSIRO (Australia), Office of Northern Australia (Australia), Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines (Australia), Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts (DSITIA) (Australia)

Bartley, Rebecca; Thomas, Mark; Clifford, David; Philip, Seonaid; Brough, Dan; Harms, Ben; Willis, Reanna; Gregory, Linda; Glover, Mark; Moodie, Keith; Sugars, Mark; Eyre, Lauren; Smith, Doug; Hicks, Warren; Petheram, Cuan (2013): Confidence of suitability data for the FGARA project. v3. CSIRO. Data Collection. https://doi.org/10.4225/08/530418128EBF2

All Rights (including copyright) CSIRO Australia 2013.

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