Regional Soil Spectral Library ERATOSTHENES Centre of Excellence

Regional Soil Spectral Library Part of pilot 2 - Improved Food Security and Water Extremes Management The importance of soils is ubiquitously recognized; they provide essential services such as food production, prevention of land degradation, water quality, and they act as carbon sinks. It has been thus recognized that a spatio-temporal monitoring of soil quality and soil properties is necessary. One of the most important technologies used to monitor soils is soil spectroscopy which utilizes the spectral information of soil samples to derive their properties. For the successful upscaling (i.e. use of Earth Observation tools) of soil spectroscopy it is important to create detailed soil spectral libraries on the ground, which assist in the validation of the sensors as well as development of soil models. The Regional Soil Spectral Library The current dataset contains a regional vis-NIR (350-2500 nm) soil spectral library of the region. It contains metadata regarding the soils sampled, their key properties, and their spectral signature. The spectral signatures were obtained using a standardization protocol. The dataset encompasses the following countries and soil properties: Country Samples SOM Texture CaCO3 pH NO3 EC CEC Albania 107 107 107 ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ Bulgaria 105 105 105 ✗ 105 ✗ ✗ 105 Cyprus 96 96 94 96 96 ✗ 93 ✗ Egypt 10 6 ✗ 4 6 ✗ 6 ✗ FYROM 124 124 124 ✗ 124 ✗ ✗ ✗ Greece 928 928 928 928 ✗ 928 ✗ ✗ Israel 221 106 193 150 137 ✗ 141 ✗ Serbia 63 63 63 63 63 63 ✗ ✗ Turkey 100 94 98 100 100 ✗ 100 ✗ All 1754 1629 1712 1341 631 991 334 105 Form of the datasets To assist future researchers using this soil spectral library, the datasets are provided in the following formats: Per country SSLs in .csv format Complete GEO-CRADLE SSL in .csv format The documentation describing what each column represents may be found in D4.6.