On-line real time soil sensor

Achievements in the real-time soil spectro-photometer are: an improved soil penetrator to ensure a uniform soil surface under high speed conditions, real-time collecting of underground soil reflectance, getting underground soil color images, use of a RTK-GPS, and all units are arranged for compactness. With the soil spectrophotometer, field experiments were conducted in a 0.5 ha paddy field. With the original reflectance, averaging and multiple scatter correction, Kubelka-Munk (KM) transformation as soil absorption, its 1st and 2nd derivatives were calculated. When the spectra was highly correlated with the soil parameters, stepwise regression analysis was conducted. Results include the best prediction models for moisture, soil organic matter (SOM), nitrate nitrogen (NO/sub 3/-N), pH and electric conductivity (EC), and soil maps obtained by block kriging analysis.