“…Commonly, the measurement of soil Cd concentration requires field sampling campaign, followed by laboratory chemical analysis. This approach faces challenges of being labor-intensive, time-consuming, environmentally unfriendly, and high expertise demanding, which do not allow meeting the needs for rapid measurement and high density sampling for soil Cd (Jia et al, 2021; J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 4 Lassalle et al, 2020;Meng et al, 2020;Tan et al, 2020). Proximal soil sensing techniques like visible-to-near-infrared (Vis-NIR) spectroscopy for estimating PTEs have attracted the attention of researchers, mainly because of the advantages of its less sample preparation and rapid characterization (Cheng et al, 2019;Gholizadeh et al, 2018;Lassalle et al, 2020;Ng et al, 2020;Sawut et al, 2018;Shi et al, 2014;Shi et al, 2017;Sun and Zhang, 2017;Todorova et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2019b).…”