A team of Idaho State University researchers working at the Reynolds Creek Critical Zone Observatory in partnership with the USDA Agricultural Research Service has discovered a simple method for predicting the spatial distribution of soil thickness across a landscape. 

Until now, it has been a large unknown because there were no good, inexpensive ways to estimate soil thickness accurately and economically across a landscape. Other methods are computationally intensive, analytically expensive, or literally backbreaking so that they are limited in scope. This method allows prediction of soil thickness anywhere with just LiDAR data – fine resolution topographic data – and as few as one soil pit.