A comparison of soil texture measurements using mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS) and laser diffraction analysis (LDA) in diverse soils

Spectroscopic methods for the determination of soil texture are faster and cheaper than the standard methods, but how do the results compare? To address this question, laser diffraction analysis (LDA) and mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS) analysis have been compared to conventional sieve-pipette meas...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2021-01, Vol.11 (1), p.16-16, Article 16
Main Authors: Thomas, Cathy L., Hernandez-Allica, Javier, Dunham, Sarah J., McGrath, Steve P., Haefele, Stephan M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/624/1107/527
639/638/440/527/2257
704/172/169
Agricultural land
Calibration
Clay
Diffraction
Humanities and Social Sciences
Infrared spectroscopy
multidisciplinary
Organic carbon
Predictions
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Soil texture
Soils
Spectrum analysis
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Summary:Spectroscopic methods for the determination of soil texture are faster and cheaper than the standard methods, but how do the results compare? To address this question, laser diffraction analysis (LDA) and mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS) analysis have been compared to conventional sieve-pipette measurements of texture in diverse European and Kenyan soils. To our knowledge this comparison between LDA and MIRS has not been made previously. It has used soils with a broad range of organic carbon (OC) contents to investigate whether, as in other techniques, clay-OC aggregation affects the estimation of clay with MIRS. The MIRS predictions of clay content were much better than the LDA measurements, but both techniques gave good measurements of sand content. The MIRS over-estimated clay at low clay content and under-estimated at high clay content (calibration set R 2  = 0.83). The LDA over-estimated clay by ~ 60% (calibration set R 2  = 0.36), indicating that the widely used clay threshold of 
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-020-79618-y