Soil & Water Res., 2021, 16(3):174-179 | DOI: 10.17221/18/2021-SWR

Development of soil organic matter measurement systemOriginal Paper

Áron Béni ORCID...^*,1, Evelin Juhász¹, Péter Ragán², Tamás Rátonyi², Gábor Várbíró³, István Fekete⁴

¹ Institute of Agricultural Chemistry and Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science and Environmental Management, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary

² Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science and Environmental Management, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary

³ Department of Tisza River Research, Danube Research, Institute, Centre for Ecology of HAS, Debrecen, Hungary

⁴ Institute of Environmental Sciences, University of Nyíregyháza, Nyíregyháza, Hungary

We managed to create a self-developed sensor system, which is based on the simultaneous reflectance measurements at a 660 and 940 nm wavelength. The ratio of the reflectance refers to the concentration of the soil organic carbon (SOC). This instrument has a calibration range of 1.19 to 6.05 SOC%. The SOC content of twenty-six soil samples was measured by the self-developed system and a standard spectrophotometric method and we found that the SOC estimation in the self-developed system had a good approximation and the differences ranged from -27.72% ~ + 6.99%. We found a strong correlation between the data of the reference measurements (R² = 0.73) and the values indicated by our self-developed sensor system (Reference (SOX%) =1.4857 × E (SOC%) - 0.7393). This measurement system is easy to use and displays and records the data in real time. This allows one to map an agricultural production area based on the SOC concentration using its built-in GPS unit.

Keywords: field instrument; reflectance measurement; SOC

Published: June 23, 2021  Show citation