Extracting soil‐independent spectral components for estimating oat residue covers

Abstract

Reflectance of radiation from the soil surface contains information on the surface residue and the soil. A factor analysis procedure was performed to separate the soil component and the oat residue component that is independent of soil. The extracted oat residue component was related to amounts of oat residue covers, using a spectral interaction model with a first order solution. An empirical model was developed from reflectance measurements of known coverage of oat residue with different soil backgrounds and tested using an independent data set taken from agricultural fields. These results suggest that the extracted oat residue component was useful for estimating crop residues from reflectance measurements. Selection of a sensitive wavelength from the wavebands measured by MMR and Exotech was performed using a principal components analysis. MMR band 5 and Exotech band 4 were the two most important wavebands in the factor analysis procedure.

Notes

Current address: Argonne National Laboratory, EAD‐900, 9700 South Cass Ave, Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.