“…The trade-off between the growing need for large scale soil information and its high cost could be resolved by a widespread use of diffuse reflectance soil spectroscopy (DRSS) in the visible-near infrared (vis-NIR) and the mid infrared (MIR) regions. The diffusely reflected/ absorbed spectral signatures have been proven to reliably predict important soil properties (Viscarra Rossel et al, 2016;Lausch et al, 2013;Bah et al, 2016;Shepherd & Walsh, 2007). They were also applied in digital soil mapping (Paul et al, 2019;Morais et al, 2018;Hengl et al, 2021;Brodský et al, 2011), evaluated for crop productivity and performance estimation , and for fertilizer decision making using a soil fertility categorical approach (Ng et al, 2020).…”