Abstract
Purpose
Comparing to conventional laboratory methods, visible–near-infrared reflectance (vis–NIR) spectroscopy is a more practical and cost-effective approach for estimating soil physical and chemical properties.
Materials and methods
This paper aims to build statistical machine learning models to investigate the efficiency of spectral data for comprehensive evaluation of the soil quality indicators. Seventeen physical and chemical properties were measured using standard methods as indicators of soil quality. Soil samples were scanned in the laboratory in the vis–NIR range (350–2500 nm), the calibration set of 31 samples and the validation set of 13 samples for cross-validation and independent validation; twenty-four preprocessing methods were tested to improve predictions, and a partial least squares regression (PLSR) was used to predict soil quality indicators.
Results and discussion
Comparing model indices, the model constructed based on the PLSR machine learning method has a good predictive power (R2 > 0.9, ratio of performance to deviation (RPD) > 3.0). For physical and chemical properties, the bulk density (BD, R2 = 0.97, RPD = 5.90), soil organic matter (SOM, R2 = 0.98, RPD = 8.56), pH (R2 = 0.95, RPD = 4.40), and TN (R2 = 0.98, RPD = 6.67) concentration were predicted. This indicates that the method is suitable for the prediction of these soil elements in this study area. For the heavy properties, except for Mn, Zn, Cd, and As, the other five heavy metal concentrations were well predicted. It can be seen that the prediction ability of the construction model is Hg, Cr, Pb, Ni, and Cu in order of superiority to inferiority. The results show that a combination of spectroscopic and chemometric techniques can be applied as a practical, rapid, low-cost, and quantitative approach for evaluating soil physical and chemical properties in Shaanxi, China.
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Abbreviations
- BD:
-
Bulk density
- SW:
-
Gravimetric soil water
- M:
-
Soil organic matter
- TN:
-
Total nitrogen
- NN:
-
Nitrate nitrogen
- AK:
-
Available potassium
- AP:
-
Available phosphorus
- SG:
-
Savitzky-Golay
- FD:
-
First deviation
- SD:
-
Second deviation
- SNV:
-
Standard normal variate
- MSC:
-
Multiplicative scatter correction
- NOR:
-
Normalization
- Max:
-
Maximum
- Min:
-
Minimum
- SD:
-
Standard deviation
- CV:
-
Coefficient of variation
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC0504705), the Project Supported by Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (2018JM4023), and the Fund Project of Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Land Consolidation (2018-TD02). We thank the Key Laboratory of Degraded and Unused Land Consolidation Engineering, the Ministry of Land and Resources, and the China-US Center for Ecological Land Engineering and Technology for their support. Furthermore, we thank the anonymous reviewers and editor for their helpful comments.
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We thank Huanyuan Wang, Rui Li, and Jianhong Sun for contributing the soil samples and spectroscopic measurements, and Jichang Han and Jiancang Xie for their help with the article writing.
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Liu, J., Xie, J., Han, J. et al. Visible and near-infrared spectroscopy with chemometrics are able to predict soil physical and chemical properties. J Soils Sediments 20, 2749–2760 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-020-02623-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-020-02623-1