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Applied and Environmental Soil Science
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 971252, 20 pages
doi:10.1155/2012/971252
A Comparison of Feature-Based MLR and PLS Regression Techniques for the Prediction of Three Soil Constituents in a Degraded South African Ecosystem
1Department of Land Surface, German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, 82234 Weßling, Germany
2Remote Sensing Section, Department of Geodesy and Remote Sensing, German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany
Received 16 February 2012; Revised 20 April 2012; Accepted 21 May 2012
Academic Editor: Eyal Ben-Dor
Copyright © 2012 Anita Bayer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The accurate assessment of selected soil constituents can provide valuable indicators to identify and monitor land changes coupled with degradation which are frequent phenomena in semiarid regions. Two approaches for the quantification of soil organic carbon, iron oxides, and clay content based on field and laboratory spectroscopy of natural surfaces are tested. (1) A physical approach which is based on spectral absorption feature analysis is applied. For every soil constituent, a set of diagnostic spectral features is selected and linked with chemical reference data by multiple linear regression (MLR) techniques. (2) Partial least squares regression (PLS) as an exclusively statistical multivariate method is applied for comparison. Regression models are developed based on extensive ground reference data of 163 sampled sites collected in the Thicket Biome, South Africa, where land changes are observed due to intensive overgrazing. The approaches are assessed upon their prediction performance and significance in regard to a future quantification of soil constituents over large areas using imaging spectroscopy.