Fast and Simultaneous Determination of Soil Properties Using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS): A Case Study of Typical Farmland Soils in China

Accurate management of soil nutrients and fast and simultaneous acquisition of soil properties are crucial in the development of sustainable agriculture. However, the conventional methods of soil analysis are generally labor-intensive, environmentally unfriendly, as well as time- and cost-consuming. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a “superstar” technique that has yielded outstanding results in the elemental analysis of a wide range of materials. However, its application for analysis of farmland soil faces the challenges of matrix effects, lack of large-scale soil samples with distinct origin and nature, and problems with simultaneous determination of multiple soil properties. Therefore, LIBS technique, in combination with partial least squares regression (PLSR), was applied to simultaneously determinate soil pH, cation exchange capacity (CEC), soil organic matter (SOM), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), total potassium (TK), available phosphorus (AP), and available potassium (AK) in 200 soils from different farmlands in China. The prediction performances of full spectra and characteristic lines were evaluated and compared. Based on full spectra, the estimates of pH, CEC, SOM, TN, and TK achieved excellent prediction abilities with the residual prediction deviation (RPDV) values > 2.0 and the estimate of TP featured good performance with RPDV value of 1.993. However, using characteristic lines only improved the predicted accuracy of SOM, but reduced the prediction accuracies of TN, TP, and TK. In addition, soil AP and AK were predicted poorly with RPDV values of < 1.4 based on both full spectra and characteristic lines. The weak correlations between conventionally analyzed soil AP and AK and soil LIBS spectra are responsible for the poor prediction abilities of AP and AK contents. Findings from this study demonstrated that the LIBS technique combined with multivariate methods is a promising alternative for fast and simultaneous detection of some properties (i.e., pH and CEC) and nutrient contents (i.e., SOM, TN, TP, and TK) in farmland soils because of the extraordinary prediction performances achieved for these attributes.