Improving Accuracy of Soil Property Measurements by NIR Spectroscopy

Traditional wet chemical methods for testing of soil properties require extensive time and labor, and cause the discharge of pollutants, making them undesirable for routine soil analyses. This research was conducted to improve the accuracy of soil properties in soil fertility assessments. A total of 140 finely ground soil samples were used to obtain accurate calibrations and validation for estimating soil moisture, OM, and T-N. Finely ground soil samples satisfied the improved accuracy for routine NIR measuring of the field soils. The results indicated that NIR spectroscopy could be used as a routine method for quantitatively determining OM, moisture, and T-N of field soil, although this technique requires many combinations of sample pretreatments and data manipulations to obtain optimal predictions.