Machine learning to automate rapid soil health assessment using infrared spectroscopy

Soil infrared spectroscopy has great potential for estimating soil properties, but reference soil measurements are typically required in combination with multivariate statistical models to estimate soil properties. User-friendly predictive tools based on open-source statistical environment remain one of the main limitations to enable technology diffusion to non-specialist users. Our aim is to build capacity for an automated machine learning routine for rapid and robust prediction of soil health indicators using lab acquired soil infrared spectra. This intelligent system runs on R statistical environment and includes (1) a diverse soil spectral library comprising main physiographic regions from the USA Midwest region under diverse land uses and various sampling depths, (2) a classification process to detect potential outliers in newly acquired spectra using supervised machine learning techniques, and (3) a multi-model optimized prediction process based on linear and non-linear statistical procedures (partial least squares, support vector machines, and neural network). This prediction system works at the intersection of soil and data science and high-performance computing to enable efficient parallel processing of spectral data on multi-core coprocessors. Using artificial intelligence to automate soil infrared spectroscopy is a fundamental demand that will make this technique an effective routine in soil laboratories to estimate soil health.