Abstract
Precision nitrogen (N) fertilizer management has the potential to improve N fertilizer use efficiency, simultaneously reducing the cost of inputs for farmers and the off-site environmental impact of crop production. Although technology is available to spatially vary sidedress N fertilizer application rates within fields, sensor technology capable of measuring soil nitrate (NO3−) levels in-real-time and on-the-go with sufficient accuracy to facilitate precision application of N fertilizers is lacking. The potential of Diamond-Attenuated Total internal Reflectance (D-ATR) Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy was evaluated as a soil NO3− sensor. Two independent datasets were tested; (1) the field dataset consisted of 124 GPS registered soil samples collected from four agricultural fields; and (2) the laboratory dataset consisted of five different soils spiked with various amounts of KNO3 (135 samples) and incubated in the laboratory. Spectra were collected using an Agilent 4100 Exoscan FTIR spectrometer equipped with a D-ATR cell and analyzed using partial least squares regression. Calibration R2 values (D-ATR-FTIR predicted versus independently measured soil NO3− concentrations) for the field and laboratory datasets were 0.83 and 0.90 (RMSE = 8.3 and 8.8 mg kg−1), respectively; and robust “leave one field/soil out” cross validation tests yielded R2 values for the field and laboratory datasets of 0.65 and 0.83 (RMSE = 12.5 and 13.3 mg kg−1), respectively. The study demonstrates the potential of using D-ATR-FTIR spectroscopy for rapid field-mobile determination of soil NO3− concentrations.
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The study was funded by the Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and by a Grant from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
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Iowa State University Research Foundation has filed a patent application on technology described in this paper and recently several of the authors have formed a startup company, N-Sense, LLC, which is exploring commercial opportunities.
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Rogovska, N., Laird, D.A., Chiou, CP. et al. Development of field mobile soil nitrate sensor technology to facilitate precision fertilizer management. Precision Agric 20, 40–55 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-018-9579-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-018-9579-0