Limited resources and large areas of steeplands with limited field access forced soil and land resource surveyors in New Zealand often to develop generalised models of soil–landscape relationships and to use these to produce soil maps by manual interpretation of aerial photographs and field survey. This method is subjective and non-reproducible. Recent studies showed the utility of digital information and analysis to complement manual soil survey.

The study presents quantitative soil–landscape models for the Hurunui and Haldon soil sets (New Zealand), developed from conceptual soil–landscape models. Spatial modelling techniques, including terrain analysis and fuzzy classification, are applied to compute membership maps of landform components for the study areas. The membership maps can be used to derive a ‘hard’ classification of land components and uncertainty maps. A soil taxonomic model is developed based on field data (soil profiles), which attaches dominant soil profiles and soil properties, including their uncertainties, to the defined land components. The method presented in this study is proposed as a potential technique for modelling land components of steepland areas in New Zealand, in which the spatial soil variation is dominantly controlled by landform properties. A soil map was developed that includes the uncertainty in the fundamental definitions of landscape units and the variability of soil properties within landscape units.