WHAT IS PEDOMETRICS?
"This branch of science has become a forte..."
R. Webster, former editor of EJSS in "Let's re-write the scientific paper", EJSS, June 2003.
Pedometrics is the Commission 1.5 of the International Union of Soil Sciences. It is a research group that gathers some 150 soil and environmental scientists, who are primarily interested in the use of statistical and mathematical tools to analyze and interpret soil data.
"Pedometrics
(PM), a term coined by A.B. McBratney, is a neologism which stems from two Greek words pedos (meaning soil) and metron (meaning measurement). It is formed and used analogously to other applied statistical fields such as biometrics, psychometrics, econometrics etc. (see Preface of Geoderma, 1994: 62). In that sense PM is:
"the application of mathematical and statistical methods for the study of the distribution and genesis of soils."
This is the official definition of Pedometrics confirmed by the PM commission (see Pedometron 15, #6 -"The definition of pedometrics", see also the wikipedia's definition of pedometrics). The domain of PM changed somewhat since its foundation. At the moment, PM is best defined as an interdisciplinary science integrating Soil Science, Applied Statistics/Mathematics and Geo-Information Science (see the relevant journals below). However, the domain of PM is not limited to only these three general sciences, as Alex McBratney stated in his first communication: "It can include numerical approaches to classification - ways of dealing with a supposed deterministic variation. Whereas simulation models per se might not be considered pedometrics (though to dismiss models of pedogenesis would be inappropriate, even foolish) models that incorporate uncertainty by adopting chaos, statistical distributions or fuzziness should be embraced. The definition is certainly incomplete but as the subject grows its core will become well defined. Nevertheless, it will always intergrade to all areas of soil science and quantitative methods and no definition by circumscription or complete enumeration of methods can be unequivocal."
One way of looking at Pedometrics is to see it as a reflection of newly emerging scientific fields such as wavelets analysis and fuzzy set theory in soil data modeling applications. The development of PM can also be considered as a result of new technological discoveries and improvements, specifically of remote and close-range sensing techniques and computers in general.
Some new emerging scientific fields that can be related
to developement of PM in the last decades.
It is important to emphasize that PM is an increasing field of Science when compared to other Soil Science sub-disciplines and subjects. Because of this, PM has been promoted from a working group to a Commission under the IUSS.
Trends of publication in Soil Science sub-disciplines and subjects between 1967 and 2001. The ordinate is the percentage of papers in Geoderma (source A.. E. Hartemink et al., 2001; Geoderma, 100, pp. 217-268).
The most recent topics covered by PM include:
- analysis and modelling of spatial and temporal variation of soil properties;
- error propagation;
- multiscale data integration;
- use of wavelets transforms to analyse complex variation;
- soil-landscape modelling using digital terrain analysis;
- quantitative soil classification algorithms;
- quantification of uncertainty and fuzziness of information and evaluation criteria;
- soil genesis simulation;
- soil pattern analysis;
- design and evaluation of sampling schemes;
- incorporation of exhaustively sampled information (remote sensing) in spatial interpolation;
- precision agriculture applications;
Some of the most common applications of pedometrics.
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