The trade-off between the growing need for large scale soil information and its high cost could be resolved by a widespread use of visible and infrared spectroscopy. While soil spectroscopy estimates of soil properties are not as accurate as reference soil analyses, they can improve regional-to-continental soil resource assessments, because more samples can be analyzed for a given budget. Light reflectance, being a physical measurement, can provide greater consistency across laboratories compared with chemical reference methods. This is the strategy followed, for instance, by the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS; Box 1). Once a library is constructed, only a fraction of new samples (10% for the AfSIS project highlighted in Box 1) needs to be submitted for reference laboratory analysis to make reliable predictions. This causes a dramatic drop of costs.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12632Altmetric score:
Dimensions Citation Count:
Publication year
2015
Authors
Nocita M; Ntevens A; van Wesemael B; Brown D J; Vargas R; Montanarella L; Shepherd K D; Towett E K
Language
English
Keywords
spectroscopy, soil reflectance, interpretation, classification
