Abstract
This study investigates the prediction of soil OM on Korean soils using the Visible-Near Infrared (Vis-NIR) spectroscopy. The ASD Field Spec Pro was used to acquire the reflectance of soil samples to visible to near-infrared radiation (350 to 2500 nm). A total of 503 soil samples from 61 Korean soil series were scanned using the instrument and OM was measured using the Walkley and Black method. For data analysis, the spectra were resampled from 500-2450 nm with 4 nm spacing and converted to the $1^{st}$ derivative of absorbance (log (1/R)). Partial least squares regression (PLSR) and regression rules model (Cubist) were applied to predict soil OM. Regression rules model estimates the target value by building conditional rules, and each rule contains a linear expression predicting OM from selected absorbance values. The regression rules model was shown to give a better prediction compared to PLSR. Although the prediction for Andisols had a larger error, soil order was not found to be useful in stratifying the prediction model. The stratification used by Cubist was mainly based on absorbance at wavelengths of 850 and 2320 nm, which corresponds to the organic absorption bands. These results showed that there could be more information on soil properties useful to classify or group OM data from Korean soils. In conclusion, this study shows it is possible to develop good prediction model of OM from Korean soils and provide data to reexamine the existing prediction models for more accurate prediction.
