Identification of Soil Texture Classes Under Vegetation Cover Based on Sentinel-2 Data With SVM and SHAP Techniques

Understanding the spatial variability of soil texture classes is essential for agricultural management and environment sustainability. Sentinel-2 data offer valuable vegetation information as proxies for soil properties inference. However, the applications of them in soil texture classification are still limited. This study investigated the usefulness of Sentinel-2 data for predicting soil texture class using an interpretable machine learning (ML) strategy. Specifically, multitemporal Sentinel-2 images were used to get exhaustive vegetation cover information. Basic digital elevation map (DEM) derivatives and stratum were extracted. Three support vector machines with different input parameters (purely DEM derivatives and stratum, purely Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-2 plus DEM derivatives and stratum) were developed. Moreover, in order to improve the transparency in black box ML models, the novel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was applied to interpret the outputs and analyze the importance of individual variables. Results showed that the model with all variables provided desirable performance with overall accuracy of 0.8435, F1-score of 0.835, kappa statistic of 0.7642, precision of 0.8388, recall of 0.8355, and area under the curve of 0.9451. The model with purely Sentinel-2 data performed much better than that with solely DEM derivatives and stratum. The contributions of Sentinel-2 data to explain soil texture class variability were about 17%, 41%, and 28% for sandy, loamy and clayey soils, respectively. The SHAP method visualized the decision process of ML and indicated that elevation, stratum, and red-edge factors were critical variables for predicting soil texture classes. This study offered much-needed insights into the applications of Sentinel-2 data in digital soil mapping and ML-assisted tasks.