Soil boundaries generally occur at natural vegetation or landscape breaks. Anthropogenic activities may change the landscape and plant community to such a degree that soil properties and the associated soil types change as well. Thus, when landscapes are altered by anthropogenic activities, identifying soil boundaries can be difficult using traditional soil survey approaches. Pedometric approaches, such as spatial interpolation, offer an alternative to the standard methods for mapping complicated soil distributions and patterns. In this study, we tested spatial interpolation as a means to map tidal marsh soils altered by anthropogenic activity. Predicted values based on kriging of soil pH, incubation pH, stable plant fragment content, and penetration resistance were not significantly different (at the 0.05 level) from the measured values. Low mean standardized errors and root mean square standardized errors were close to 1, suggesting that the kriged models were effective in interpolating soil properties. Multiparameter soil maps, created through merging kriged data, showed striking differences between reference and altered tidal marshes. Reference marshes were fairly homogenous, with 1 to 4 mapping units explaining spatial distributions. Altered marshes, however, needed 8-16 mapping units over the same area to illustrate soil distributions. Interpolated maps clearly showed the extent of marsh degradation as a result of anthropogenic activity. These soil maps can be used to identify areas with the greatest potential for restoration of disturbed marshes and those areas that will require considerable restoration effort and management.
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