Norfolk Island soil surface condition DSM attribute

Soil surface condition is one of nine soil attributes analysed as one component of a digital soil mapping exercise undertaken as part of the Norfolk Island Water Resource Assessment (NIWRA). It was selected due to its importance to groundwater recharge, surface water storage and managed aquifer recharge. Soil surface condition affects water infiltration and is described when soil is dry as defined by the National Committee on Soil and Terrain 2009 (NCST) surface condition descriptions. This raster data represents a modelled dataset of soil surface condition and is derived from field measured site data and environmental covariates. Data values are: 1 Loose and/or soft, 2 Firm and/or hardsetting. A companion dataset presenting reliability of this data is also provided and can be found described in the lineage section of this metadata record. Processing was carried out in the ranger package inside R and attributes were modelled using a Random Forest approach. Further soil surface condition information can be found in the NIWRA technical report (Petheram et al., 2020). The DSM process is described in Appendix E of the NIWRA technical report.