Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Measuring Soil Properties

The purpose of this research was to develop a the reflection technique with near infrared (NIR) radiation for estimating soil components. NIR reflectance was scanned at 2nm intervals from 1100 to 2500nm with an InfraAlyzer 500 (Bran & Luebbe Co.). Over 400 soil sample from fields of different crops and land-use over Youngnam and Honam regions were used to obtain mean diffuse reflection of the soil for the calibration and validation of the calibration set in estimating moisture, organic matter (OM) and total nitrogen (T-N) of the soils. Multiple linear regression (MLR) was used to evaluate the correlation of NIR spectroscopy method. Reflection pattern of NIR spectra for finely sized sample (<0.5mm) and coarsely sized soil(<2mm) did not show much difference. The results showed that NIR spectroscopy and coarsely sized soil (<2mm) did not show much difference. The results showed that NIR spectroscopy could be used as a routine soil testing method in estimating OM, moisture, T-N in soil samples simultaneously.