Spectroscopy as a Diagnostic Tool for Urban Soil

Abstract

The soils found in urban remnant patches may be considered anthropogenic inner urban soils-soils within the administrative boundaries of a municipalities influenced by activities adding artefacts into the soils. Such activities include housing, trading, traffic, production, and disposing. The objective of this study is to determine the scope to which field spectroscopy methods can be used to extend the knowledge of urban soils features and components. The spectroscopy techniques are used broadly for determining specific components or for differentiating between known ones. Moreover, this technique is able to determine low concentration in various phases and to trace hazardous material, and most studies are keen on quantification of those hazardous. In this paper, a top-down analysis for detecting the presence of minerals, organic matter, and pollutants in mixed soil samples is developed and presented. The developed method applies spectral activity (SA) detection in a structured hierarchical approach to quickly and, more importantly, accurately identify dominant spectral features. The developed method is adopted by multiple in-production tools including continuum removal normalization, guided by polynomial generalization, and spectral-likelihood algorithms: orthogonal subspace projection (OSP) and iterative spectral mixture analysis (ISMA).