Modelling and mapping Soil Organic Carbon in annual cropland under different farm management systems in the Apulia region of Southern Italy

Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) plays a crucial role in many soil functions and ecosystem services. Monitoring its spatial and temporal changes is essential for planning strategies to minimize soil degradation and loss and maintain its quality. Conservation Agriculture (CA) can make a significant contribution to increasing SOC. This article reports on the spatially modeled SOC concentration in the topsoil (0–0.3 m) of the Annual Cropland (ACL) under Conventional Management (CM) and CA in the Apulia region in Italy. To assess the spatial and temporal dynamics of SOC at the regional scale, the “Scorpan-SSPFe” (soil spatial prediction function with spatially autocorrelated errors) approach to predictive modeling and mapping of soil, based on the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model was performed. The method was implemented using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and Google Earth Engine (GEE) environment to calculate the percentage distribution for each SOC level, altitude, and slo...