Determination of soil attribute contents by means of reflected electromagnetic energy

Remote sensing involves huge data bases of spectral reflectance in developing a new soil analysis method. The objective of this work was to use spectral reflectance data to determine the contents of physical, chemical, and mineralogical attributes of 9 soil classes with a sensor in the laboratory. To that end, a database was organized containing information on 3,300 soil samples and their respective analyses and radiometry, from the Brazilian states of Sao Paulo and Parana. With the use of spectral data, multiple regression equations were obtained for 20 soil attributes. The physical and mineralogical attributes presented had, for the most part, coefficients of determination higher than 0.70, while for chemical attributes this value was, in general, smaller than 0.50. Attributes whose models obtained R2 > 0.50 were tested on unknown samples that did not take part in the generation of the model. The model‐estimated soil content values of those samples were then compared with values determined in the labora...