Sampling designs
What is a sampling design?
While our soil maps provide a good estimate of the state of your land, you might find yourself in a situation where you will require a more certain soil evaluation, most notably in terms of soil carbon. For that you will need to perform measurements on samples of your soil. To help with that, we provide sampling design functionality to get the most of your soil sampling while reducing the cost.
A Sampling Design
is a suggested configuration of soil sample locations optimized through one of the three methods that we provide.
Generating a sampling design
To generate a sampling design, click on the "Sampling Designs" button in the left sidebar while in Farm view. In the sampling design view, click on the "Generate" at the bottom of the sidebar. You will be presented with an input popout, where you will be required to enter a name for the sampling design, as well as choose the generation method and the number of samples. You can also click on the "Optimize" button (next to the number of samples input), in which case the system will suggest a number for you.
Sampling Design methods
We provide 3 different methods for generating sampling designs:
- Simple Random - locations are randomly generated inside your farm geometry
- Feature Space Coverage - sampling locations are derived from the distributions of covariate layers for our soil carbon maps
- Uncertainty Driven - sampling locations are chosen to optimally cover areas with the highest uncertainty in our soil carbon maps
Depending on the method chosen and the size of your farm, sampling design generation might take up to a few minutes. Once generated, the new sampling design will appear in the sidebar along with any previously generated sampling designs for your farm.
By clicking on any of the listed sampling designs, the one you have clicked on will become the active one, and its geometry (along with the farm geometry it was generated for) will be shown on the map.
Exporting the active sampling design
can be done by clicking on the export button at the bottom of the sidebar. We provide sampling design exports in these formats:
- GPX
- GeoPackage
- GeoJSON
- KML
API usage
You can access sampling design creation and management through our API, by requesting against the Sampling Design part of the API.