Brazilian Soil Spectral Library

Soil Spectroscopy is one of the most important tool developed by basic science and an efficient technic used in remote sensing for soil survey, land monitoring, and qualitative and quantitative soil mapping. This project is designed in a collaborative format based on the creation of a soil spectral library to represent the Brazilian territory, for this the project will organize a huge soil sample set and correlate with their electromagnetic attributes as well as with the physical and chemical attributes. 

 

Summarized goals:

a) Demonstrate the potential of the tool for its use in tropical soil;

b) Strengthen and catalyze the creation of new development poles in the scientific community;

c) Create a National Research Group at CNPq: Brazilian Soil Spectroscopy Group (Grupo de Espectroscopia de Solos do Brasil, GESB). 

Currently the library has 5000 samples of seven Brazilian states, the majority obtained by the research group of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Soil Science Department at Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture - University of São Paulo. Adding to these, there are 500 samples shared by researchers, totalizing 12 states. The library isn’t representative for Brazil, and that is why we need to collect more data in order to organize them and prepare them for use. Currently the Library has data in the visible and near infra-red range of the electromagnetic spectrum Vis-NIR (350 to 2500 nm), but we are looking forward to collecting data in the Mid infrared (2500 to 25000 nm) from all the participants.

 

In this respect, we would like to encourage the participation of all researchers to keep us competitive with other countries that are having the same initiative