Use of In-situ Shallow Subsurface Spectroscopy for Measuring Soil Organic Carbon

Healthy soils are essential to human well-being and to overall environmental quality.Key to soilhealth is maintenance of the soil's organic carbon content.Recently carbon credit markets haveemerged a means of incentivizing practices that increase the organic carbon content of soils. Theresulting carbon sequestration in soils will also contribute to stabilization of atmospheric CO2levels. However such markets are not feasible without cost-effective and efficient means forverifying the soil organic carbon content.The outcome of this proposed project is a prototypeunit the Subterra Green Model P that enables land managers to rapidly and accurately map theorganic carbon content of their soils in three dimensions to depth of one meter.The unitemploys a visible/near-infrared spectroscopic probe that is pushed into the soil at intervals and issmall and maneuverable enough to be operated by one person in many different vegetativeconditions.In the proposed work plan we will significantly modify the design of our existingprototype hardware by incorporating new spectrometers and a GPS unit andnew chemometricanalysis and mapping algorithms. To assure the required accuracy and precision the modifiedprototype will be tested at four Ohio sites with varying soil texture organic matter content andland cover conditions and then it will be iteratively improved based on the test results.