| As the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) reformulates the Greater Everglades ecosystem in an attempt to restore more historical processes, metrics of recovery are paramount, both for status reporting and adaptive management. In many respects, soils are a useful ecosystem performance measure: they change at time scales well-suited to large-area diagnostic surveillance, are sensitive to numerous stressors, and integrate ecological processes. Soil properties cannot be inferred remotely because of vegetation cover, so this project explores the feasibility of using high-resolution diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) for sample analysis at reduced costs in the Greater Everglades.
This project explored the use of an emerging optical technique for the measurement of soil properties. Near infrared spectroscopy is increasingly viewed as a low cost, high throughput, high precision alternative to conventional soil analytical approaches, and is particularly useful in the context of large-area surveillance where adequate sampling density is often cost-prohibitive. We used over 3000 soils from the Greater Everglades to create the models that relate reflectance information to soil properties. Successful calibrations were observed for organic matter, soil nitrogen, soil total phosphorus, soil calcium, and soil organic matter quality (fiber fractionation). |
