Use of Soil Health Card Data for Nutrient Mapping: A Case Study of Bemetara District, Chhattisgarh

The soil health card programme has been undertaken by all Indian states for sustainable crop production. High resolution nutrient maps prepared from the measured point data will be of great help for fertilizer management. The present study used the popular method of interpolation i.e., ordinary kriging (OK) in mapping major soil nutrients of Bemetara district from national soil health card scheme data. A total of 14491 geo-referenced soil health card data were used for the study. The soils were neutral in reaction (pH ranging 6.5 to 7.9 with mean of 7.2) and non-saline. The soils were mostly low to medium in organic carbon (mean 0.69 %) and available phosphorous (mean 17.24 kg ha-1), low in available nitrogen (mean 228 kg ha-1) and medium to high in available potassium (mean 390 kg ha-1). Semivariogram modeling was done with 70 per cent of samples and the output maps were validated with the rest of 30 per cent samples. The semivariogram generated for the soil nutrients during interpolation approach (OK) showed poor spatial dependency among the points resulting in lower accuracies in nutrient mapping.