Impact of climate change on soils within the next century at the global scale
Résumé
On a global scale climate is the major soil forming factor. Future changes in temperature and precipitation regimes will undoubtedly alter soil forming processes, and, with them, soil properties and the boundaries of soil type distribution. Using the distribution of soil subgroups from the ISRIC (International Soil Reference and Information Centre) WISE soil property database, and climate data from WorldClim, we investigated the statistical relationships between soil types and climate. In our statistical approach, we combined extreme gradient boosting with rule and instance based regression modelling (cubist). The results showed that about one third of the soil subgroups are strongly linked to
climate (soils with gelic properties, various acrisols, ferralsols, podzols, etc.). We used the statistical models to predict potential changes in the distribution of soils with strong climate links using future climate predictions for 2061-2080. This allow us quantifying for each soil group the surfaces that will be impacted by climate change and the potential soil type that will be in concordance with the new climate conditions.