Improving Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) prediction by field spectrometry in bare cropland by reducing the disturbing effect of soil roughness

The spatial estimation of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) at large scale in outdoor condition is an important issue. It has been largely demonstrated that diffuse reflectance spectroscopic techniques, are efficient for SOC determination in field conditions. However these methods are influenced by disturbing factors such as soil water content, vegetation residues and surface roughness, the later being the object of this study. Our laboratory experiments showed that the accuracy of SOC prediction from shadowed soil samples with spectroscopy techniques decreases with increasing soil shadow. In this study a new methodology using a digital camera for identifying and correcting the effect of soil shadow on field reflectance spectra measured with an Analytical Spectral Devices (ASD) during field campaign in bare crop lands has been elaborated and tested. Results showed that the proposed shadow correction method enables improving significantly SOC prediction accuracy and performs better than traditionally used methods consisting in automatic signal processing.