Spatial analysis of soil quality through landscape patterns in the Shoor River Basin, Southwestern Iran

[Display omitted] •The soil quality changed as a result of the landscape pattern alteration.•The land use patch density was among the most important landscape properties affected the soil quality.•The soil quality had significant spatial relationships to elevation, slope, and NDVI.•The soil quality level was higher in the forest land use compared to farmland and rangeland. The soil quality is the inherent capacity of soils to function in an ecosystem, which depend on soil properties and change under the influence of landscape patterns. This study aimed to evaluate the soil quality in the Shoor River basin, southwestern Iran, by using the soil quality indicators based on two approaches, i.e., minimum data set and total data set. The spatial relationships of the soil quality to landscape pattern properties (e.g., density, dominance, shape, aggregation, and diversity of patches) were also analyzed through the exploratory regression in the Arc GIS 10.5 software in addition to the effects of land use, elevation, slope, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) on the soil quality. The results indicated that the soils of northern and eastern regions of the study area had higher levels of quality than those of southern and western regions. Very low and very high of soil quality covered