Regional Soil Spectral Library

Part of pilot 2 - Improved Food Security and Water Extremes Management

The importance of soils is ubiquitously recognized; they provide essential services such as food production, prevention of land degradation, water quality, and they act as carbon sinks. It has been thus recognized that a spatio-temporal monitoring of soil quality and soil properties is necessary. One of the most important technologies used to monitor soils is soil spectroscopy which utilizes the spectral information of soil samples to derive their properties. For the successful upscaling (i.e. use of Earth Observation tools) of soil spectroscopy it is important to create detailed soil spectral libraries on the ground, which assist in the validation of the sensors as well as development of soil models.

The Regional Soil Spectral Library

The current dataset contains a regional vis-NIR (350-2500 nm) soil spectral library of the region. It contains metadata regarding the soils sampled, their key properties, and their spectral signature. The spectral signatures were obtained using a standardization protocol. The dataset encompasses the following countries and soil properties:

Country	Samples	SOM	Texture	CaCO3	pH	NO3	EC	CEC
Albania	107	107	107	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗
Bulgaria	105	105	105	✗	105	✗	✗	105
Cyprus	96	96	94	96	96	✗	93	✗
Egypt	10	6	✗	4	6	✗	6	✗
FYROM	124	124	124	✗	124	✗	✗	✗
Greece	928	928	928	928	✗	928	✗	✗
Israel	221	106	193	150	137	✗	141	✗
Serbia	63	63	63	63	63	63	✗	✗
Turkey	100	94	98	100	100	✗	100	✗
All	1754	1629	1712	1341	631	991	334	105

Form of the datasets

To assist future researchers using this soil spectral library, the datasets are provided in the following formats:

Per country SSLs in .csv format
Complete GEO-CRADLE SSL in .csv format

The documentation describing what each column represents may be found in D4.6.

Activity Stream