Methodology for the disaggregation of polytaxic cartographic units in intensive conventional soil mapsapplication towards the improvement of the integrated terroir zoning of the designation of origin Campo de Borja

Resumen

The growing demand for sustainable management of natural resources requires detailed soil maps. An approach involves the improvement of conventional soil maps by "disaggregating" their polytaxonomic map units using digitized environmental data and quantitative statistical techniques, within "Digital Soil Mapping" framework. This thesis proposes a new disaggregation methodology that allows detecting more specific homogeneous soil areas by selecting covariates with larger explanatory power followed by an unsupervised CLARA classification and correlating them with the taxonomic units by expert knowledge. Its implementation on the D.O. Campo de Borja generated a new 1:10,000 map, with more and better-defined units. This formed the basis for a new integrated zoning of the terroir of this region. These results provide a new ground for updating soil resource inventories with finer detail and for new studies regarding terroir characteristics.