Assessing the Visible–Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Method and PLSR and SVMR Methods in Modeling Organic Carbon and Total Neutralizing Value of Soil

For sustainable land management, it is necessary to understand the functions and characteristics of soils, and their spatial and temporal changes. Visible and near-infrared spectroscopy has a specific capability to identify and determine soil properties due to high accuracy and high-performance speed. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of visible and near-infrared spectroscopy method in estimating soil organic matter and total neutralizing value. Therefore, 110 soil samples were collected from Khuzestan, Yazd and Tehran provinces, and spectral reflectance was performed using ASD FieldSpec3. The spectra obtained from the spectrometer were pre-processed using five methods including Savitzky-Golay filter (SG), the first derivative with the Savitzky-Golay filter (FD-SG), the second derivative with the Savitzky-Golay filter (SD-SG), the standard normal variate (SNV), and Multiplicative scatter correction (MSC). Also, the performance of PLSR and SVMR methods was compared in terms of soil organic carbon and total neutralizing value estimation. The results indicated that the PLSR model in estimating both organic carbon properties and total neutralizing value had higher accuracy compared to the SVR model. In estimation of soil organic carbon, PLSR method and MSC preprocessing method had the best performance (R2VAL=0.59, RMSEVAL=0.19 and PRDVAL=1.47) and the second derivative method had the least performance (R2VAL=0.15, RMSEVAL=0.27 and PRDVAL=0.52). Also for estimation of total neutralizing value, the first derivative preprocessing method had the best performance (R2VAL=0.78, RMSEVAL=5.70 and PRDVAL=2.01) and the second derivative method had the least performance (R2VAL=0.1, RMSEVAL=11.13, and PRDVAL=0.31). The key wavelengths were observed for soil organic matter in the range of 421- 612 nm and for total neutralizing value in the range of 2315- 2151 nm. This study showed that the Vis-NIR spectroscopy method, due to its physical basis and considering the influencing factors, as a large-scale model, makes it possible to evaluate and predict soil OC and TNV.