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The importance of zeros in digital soil mapping I: a review

2025· article· en· W4416908394 on OpenAlex
Travis Pennell, Louis‐Pierre Comeau, Cindy Feng, Brandon Heung

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueGeoderma · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSoil Geostatistics and Mapping
Canadian institutionsAgriculture and Agri-Food CanadaDalhousie University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaAgriculture and Agri-Food CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsDigital soil mappingSoil mapSampling (signal processing)Selection (genetic algorithm)Model selectionCompositional dataDigital elevation modelR packageData integration

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The presence and influence of excess zeros has been understudied and inconsistently applied within the digital soil mapping (DSM) field. Other disciplines have identified the challenges associated with fitting empirical models when the data are highly zero-inflated and have contributed to the development of modelling frameworks that can be employed to overcome them. This paper presents the need to address zero-inflation (ZI) and two of the primary methodologies currently used: zero-inflated models and two-part frameworks. The selection of which modelling framework to use relies primarily upon the researcher understanding the source of ZI within their data set, a frequent challenge when using legacy data in DSM. Several examples of properties where ZI has been recognized or is likely to occur in DSM are detailed, including depth to bedrock, coarse fragment content, horizon thickness, soil inorganic carbon, soil contaminants, and soil organisms. Ultimately, the review of ZI within DSM literature revealed that few papers have employed modelling strategies to handle excess zero values, some apply the frameworks inconsistently, and no papers directly address the source of zero observations. Future areas of research are introduced including the integration of machine learning into ZI frameworks, the suitability of ZI models as a reference to identify possible false zeros, specific use cases in spatial applications, and the use of ZI in non-target observations that may be encountered in bulk soil sampling for several properties.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.138
Threshold uncertainty score0.167

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.235
Teacher spread0.226 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it