Mapping Soil Organic Carbon Stock Using Multisource Remote Sensing Indicators in Khat (Catha edulis)-Dominated Landscapes of Eastern Ethiopia

Soil organic carbon (SOC) stock is a key component of terrestrial ecosystems, playing a critical role in climate regulation and ecosystem productivity. Despite its economic importance, the impacts of the expansion of khat (Catha edulis) cultivation at the expense of other land uses and its intensive management practices on the depletion of soil carbon content are overlooked in Eastern Ethiopia. This study aimed to estimate and map SOC stocks using multispectral Sentinel-2 and RapidEye imagery, combined with environmental, soil, and topographic variables, across khat-dominated landscapes in the Haramaya District of Eastern Ethiopia. A total of 88 soil samples were collected and analyzed to quantify SOC stocks. Random Forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms were employed to predict SOC stocks. The dataset was stratified into training (70%) and an independent validation (30%) subset. Model development was performed using five-fold cross-validation on the training dataset, while final performance was assessed on the independent validation set using the coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). Laboratory-measured SOC stocks ranged from 24.99 to 65.94 Mg C ha−1, with a mean value of 36.88 Mg C ha−1. The predicted spatial SOC stocks ranged from 30.4 to 50.4 Mg C ha−1 using RapidEye data and from 32.8 to 51.5 Mg C ha−1 using Sentinel-2, with Sentinel-2 producing slightly higher mean estimates. The lowest SOC stocks were consistently observed in bare, grass, and shrub land-use types across both datasets. RF demonstrated superior performance compared with XGBoost, achieving moderate predictive performance for both the RapidEye (R2 = 0.56, RMSE = 5.91 Mg C ha−1) and Sentinel-2 (R2 = 0.42, RMSE = 6.90 Mg C ha−1) datasets. This result indicates that RF provided greater robustness for SOC stock prediction under the heterogeneous environmental conditions of khat-dominated agricultural landscapes. Topographic and soil-related variables, particularly the Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), land surface temperature (LST), and clay content, were identified as the most influential predictors in both models. Although less consistent, remote sensing indices such as GNDVI, BSI, and NDWI also contributed to SOC prediction. While both sensors proved effective for SOC mapping, a measurable sensor-related effect was observed. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating multisource remote sensing, environmental, soil, and topographic variables with machine learning for SOC stock mapping in khat-dominated landscapes. This approach provides valuable spatial information to understand SOC variability and support sustainable land management and climate change mitigation strategies in Eastern Ethiopia.