Estimating and mapping of soil organic matter content in a typical river basin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Abstract

Spectroscopy is a fast, non-destructive, and cheap method, which has been widely used in the estimation of soil organic matter (SOM) concentration. This study presented a methodology to estimate and map SOM content by crop canopy reflectance spectra combining with land parameters in the Yarlung Zangbo River (YZR) basin. The reflectance spectra of the oat canopy were collected in the field, and then were processed by savitzky-golay filtering (S-G), continuous removal (CR), and first derivative of reflectivity (FDR). The principal components were extracted from the processed spectral data. Land parameters such as elevation, slope, NDVI, and land surface temperature (LST) were selected to establish 18 models to estimate SOM content. The results showed that the estimation accuracy of SOM content could be improved by combining crop canopy reflectance spectra with land parameters. FDR-BPNN model with land parameters had the best estimation effect (R2 = 0.973, MAE = 0.847 g·kg−1).