Spatial interpolation of cropland soil bulk density by increasing soil samples with filled missing values.

Large sample sizes are crucial for accurately capturing spatial changes in soil properties by spatial interpolation methods. However, soil bulk density (BD) data in historical datasets is often incomplete, and it's uncertain if filled values enhance spatial interpolation accuracy. Using 2,883 cropland soil BD samples from the Sichuan Basin in China, we developed the best prediction models from traditional pedotransfer function (PTF), multiple linear regression (MLR), random forest (RF), and radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) to fill missing BD values for 1,336 samples.