On-line measurement of some selected soil properties for controlled input crop management systems

Abstract

The evaluation of the soil spatial variability using a fast, robust and cheap tool is one of the key steps towards the implementation of Precision Agriculture (PA) successfully. Soil organic carbon (OC), soil total nitrogen (TN) and soil moisture content (MC) are needed to be monitored for both agriculture and environmental applications. The literature has proven that visible and near infrared (vis-NIR) spectroscopy to be a quick, cheap and robust tool to acquire information about key soil properties simultaneously with relatively high accuracy. The on-line vis-NIR measurement accuracy depends largely on the quality of calibration models. In order to establish robust calibration models for OC, TN and MC valid for few selected European farms, several factors affecting model accuracy have been studied. Nonlinear calibration techniques, e.g. artificial neural network (ANN) combined with partial least squares regression (PLSR) has provided better calibration accuracy than the linear PLSR or principal component regression analysis (PCR) alone. It was also found that effects of sample concentration statistics, including the range or standard derivation and the number of samples used for model calibration are substantial, which should be taking into account carefully. Soil MC, texture and their interaction effects are other principle factors affecting the in situ and on-line vis-NIR measurement accuracy. This study confirmed that MC is the main negative effect, whereas soil clay content plays a positive role. The general calibration models developed for soil OC, TN and MC for farms in European were validated using a previously developed vis-NIR on-line measurement system equipped with a wider vis-NIR spectrophotometer (305 – 2200 nm) than the previous version. The validation results showed this wider range on-line vis-NIR system can acquire larger than 1500 data point per ha with a very good measurement accuracy for TN and OC and excellent accuracy for MC. The validation also showed that spiking few target field samples into the general calibration models is an effective and efficient approach for upgrading the implementation of the on-line vis-NIR sensor for measurement in new fields in the selected European farms.