Assessing Reclamation Levels of Coastal Saline Lands with Integrated Stepwise Discriminant Analysis and Laboratory Hyperspectral Data

Abstract

ABSTRACT At different times over the past 30 years in Zhejiang Province, China, the coastal tidelands have been successively enclosed and reclaimed for agricultural land use. The purpose of this work was to evaluate whether laboratory hyperspectral data might be used to estimate the physicochemical characteristics of these reclaimed saline soils. A coastal region of Shangyu City (Zhejiang Province), which was grouped into four subzones according to reclamation history, was used as the study area, and soil samples were collected in each subzone. Physicochemical analyses showed that the soils were characterized by high electrical conductivity and sand content with low organic matter; the longer the saline lands had been reclaimed, the lower were the electrical conductivity and sand content and the higher the organic matter content. These changing trends of soil chemical and physical properties were found in laboratory reflectance spectra of soil samples and their first-order derivative curves. Stepwise discriminant analysis (SDA) identified six salient spectral bands at 488, 530, 670, 880, 1400, and 1900 nm. Using derived discriminant functions for saline lands with different historical years of reclamation, classification revealed an overall accuracy from a self-test of 86.6% and from cross-validation of 89.3%. Therefore, as opposed to time-consuming field investigations, this study suggested that remotely sensed hyperspectral data could serve as a promising measure to assess the reclamation levels of coastal saline lands.