Simultaneous Determination of Moisture, Organic Carbon, and Total Nitrogen by Near Infrared Reflectance Spectrophotometry

Abstract

Near infrared diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry, within the wavelength range 1100 to 2500 nm, was investigated for use in the simultaneous prediction of the moisture, organic C, and total N contents of air‐dried soils. An infraAlyzer 500 C (Technicon Instruments Corp.) scanning spectrophotometer was used to obtain near infrared reflectance of soils at 2‐nm intervals. Calibration equations for each of the soil constituents studied were based upon selection of the best combination of three wavelengths in a multiple regression analysis. The wavelengths selected for moisture, organic C, and total N, respectively, were 1926, 1954, and 2150 nm, 1744, 1870 and 2052 nm, and 1702, 1870 and 2052 nm. The standard errors of prediction for finely ground samples (<0.25 mm) from the top layers (0‐0.1, 0.1‐0.2, 0.2‐0.3, 0.3‐0.6 m) were 0.58, 0.16, and 0.014% for moisture, organic C, and total N, respectively. The standard errors of prediction, however, were much larger for coarsely ground soils (<2 mm), soils containing low amounts of organic C (<0.3%) and total N (<0.03%), and for those with a wide range in colors. Within a narrow range in soil color and at moderate amounts of organic matter (0.3–2.5%C), the near infrared reflectance technique provides a rapid, nondestructive, and simultaneous measurement of moisture, organic C and total N in soils

Rapid simultaneous rating of soil texture, organic matter, total nitrogen and nitrogen mineralization potential by near infra-red reflectance

“…The use of more sophisticated instrumentation, such as a scanning spectrophotometer, could also produce more reliable results. Dalal & Henry (1986), using a scanning instrument (Technicon 500) obtained higher correlation coefficients and smaller standard errors of prediction when determining organic matter and total N contents of soil. It is noteworthy that three of the five wavelengths used in the present study for organic matter were within 50 nm of the wavelengths reported by Dalal & Henry (1986).…”

“…The reflectance increased exponentially with decreasing particle size down to 0,4 mm. Dalal & Henry (1986) reported the successful application of NIR to determining the moisture, organic C and total N contents of soils. Results of a preliminary evaluation of NIR for the determination of organic matter, texture and N-mineralizing potential of some sugar industry soils were reported by Meyer et ai.…”

Comparing different data preprocessing methods for monitoring soil heavy metals based on soil spectral features

“…Furthermore, this method has been adjusted to analyze the spectrally active properties of sediment and soil samples. For example, many studies have shown that, under laboratory conditions, some soil constituents which have spectral features, such as Fe 2 O 3 (Ji et al 2002), carbonates (Ben-Dor & Banin 1990), organic matter (Dalal & Henry 1986;Reeves et al 2002), and clay (Ben-Dor & Banin 1995;Kooistra et al 2003), can be accurately determined by reflectance spectroscopy. Moreover, recent studies have shown that via the inter-correlation between spectrally featureless constituents and constituents with spectral features, even featureless soil constituents can be predicted by soil reflectance spectra.…”

Predicting Organic Matter content in Korean Soils Using Regression rules on Visible-Near Infrared Diffuse Reflectance Spectra

“…Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has become well established in agricultural field (Wetzel, 1983). Recently, NIR spectroscopy techniques have been developed as a useful quantitative tool for the prediction of various soil properties; including soil moisture, soil organic carbon, nitrogen content, and soil texture (Dalal and Henry, 1986;Morra et al, 1991;Reeves et al, 2002).…”