【Objective】As an important kind of forensic evidence with valuable information, soil plays a key role in case detection and court trials. For an unknown soil sample, how to determine its source is an issue worth studying. 【Method】 In this paper, a stochastical forest model was adopted to identify sources of soil samples based on vis–NIR spectra and soil chemical properties of the soils in Heilongjiang Anhui and Jiangsu, on a trans-provincial and a provincial scale; comparison performed of the usages of different soil datasets and combination schemes in effect of the identification; analysis conducted of relative importances of soil chemical attributes and spectral data; and evaluation made of determination accuracy based on ratio of the number of the samples correctly determined to the total number of samples.【Result】 Results show that the model combining spectral principal component (PC) and chemical data is the best one in determining sources of soil samples on the cross-provincial scale, with accuracy being 0.92. As spectral measurement does not require many soil samples, in the case the amount of soil samples is limited and soil chemical data is hard to obtain, the spectral-PC-and-absorption-peak-combining model is the highest in accuracy, reaching 0.82. On the provincial scale, the combination of spectral PC and soil chemical property data is still the best one with accuracy being 0.83. When soil chemical property data are hard to obtain, the spectral-PC-and-absorption-peak-combining model can achieve considerable accuracy (0.82), which indicates that spectra can be used to replace soil chemical property data in modeling for determination of sources of soils on the provincial scale. To evaluate importance of discriminant factors on the two scales, it is found that the contents of total potassium (TK) and total phosphorus (TP), the first PC of spectra and spectral absorption peaks at 350~600 nm and 1 800~ 2 100 nm band are the most important indices in the model for determination on the trans-provincial scale. While the content of TP and the seventh PC of spectra and spectral absorption peaks at 350~600 nm and 1 800~ 2 100 nm band were in the model for determination on the province scale.【Conclusion】All the findings indicate that source of a soil sample can be accurately identified based on vis–NIR spectroscopy and soil chemical property data. When spatial distribution of sampling sites varies in range in the model, it is advisable to consider the use of different determination factors in modeling and multiple indices in evaluating accuracy of the determination.