Use of Remote Sensing Techniques for Robust Detection and Estimations of Soil Organic Carbon: A Review

Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) plays an important role in soil fertility, complex water and nutrient exchange processes in plant root zone, land degradation and global carbon cycle. Space technology is an efficient tool to: 1) estimate and map the SOC stocks and 2) rectify the stakeholders for enough food production and climate change management. Several studies and patents have reported complimentary results and successful applications of remotely sensed data for estimations of SOC at different resolutions, techniques and approaches. However, the results are susceptible to: 1) remotely sensed data quality and technical efficiency, 2) sufficient number of samples representing variability of soils and land use, 3) suitable methods and techniques selected for laboratory analyses of sampled soils, and 4) selected methods and techniques for calibrations of spectra. Therefore, reported success studies are very site-, image- and situation-specific and insufficient to reach at global conclusions. The field is new, active, attractive, challenging and interesting area of research for soil fertility and climate change management.