Agroecological assessment of spatial variability of carbon content in the conditions of disturbed sod-podzolic soils

RSAU-MTAA, Ecology Department, 127434 Timiryazevskaya st., 49, Russian Federation

^* Corresponding author: yaroslavtsevam@gmail.com

Abstract

Soil carbon is one of the main carbon pools of terrestrial ecosystems. The carbon of arable soils is the most labile. In this regard, rapid and accurate methods for determining soil carbon in different forms are of great interest to researchers. Therefore, in this paper we decided to conduct a comparative analysis of the results of organic carbon determination using the Walkley-Black method (colorimetric method), the Dumas dry combustion method (using the CN Vario El Cube analyzer)) and the remote method using the Valeeva approach (Valeeva, Aleksandrova, Koposov, 2016) according to the values of the red channel of the spectrum, on the images obtained using an RGB camera mounted on a DJI Phantom 4 drone. For laboratory analysis, 100 soil samples of the arable horizon were collected at regular grid points, georeferenced using RTK. The correlation between the Dumas dry combustion method and potassium dichromate oxidation was 0.24 (for n = 100, significant p=0.195), allowing comparison at the trend level. The highest correlation (R = 0.39 was observed between the data obtained using the Dumas method and the Valeeva-Alexandrova approach, indicating that it can be used to estimate soil carbon dynamics from RGB images. Correlation analysis showed relationships (R = 0.63) between total carbon and microrelief, which is reflected by the drone-derived digital elevation model.