Soil organic carbon content retrieved by UAV-borne high resolution spectrometer

Zhu, Y. Wang, D. Zhang, He [UCL] Shi, Pu [UCL]

Soil stores more carbon in the terrestrial ecosystem than the combined vegetation and atmosphere. Soil organic carbon (SOC) as the key component of soil carbon pool is highly sensitive to earth surface evolution and anthropogenic-induced changes in climate and agricultural management practices. The spatiotemporal dynamics can exert important controls over soil productivity and ecosystem services. There is thus an increasing demand to quantify SOC at sufficiently high resolution and accuracy, thereby detecting localized soil degradation as well as ensuring sustainable agricultural management. Field-, airborne and satellite-based multi-platform Visible and Near-Infrared (Vis-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy has increasingly been used as a fast and effective tool to predict SOC, and thereby capture the variability at field to landscape scales. Comparing to the satellite-based remote sensing systems, commercially available portable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with high-resolution Vis-NIR spectrometers can greatly improve the spatial resolution and acquisition efficiency of soil spectral information. It is also more flexible to carry out field surveys thanks to the small size, but applications of UAV-based spectroscopic assessment of SOC so far are still scarce.