Enhancing soil nitrogen measurement via visible-near infrared spectroscopy: Integrating soil particle size distribution with long short-term memory models

Good quality of soil nitrogen data, which is essential for the advancement of both enhanced agricultural management and ecological environment, traditionally depends on labor intensive chemical procedures. Visible near-infrared (Vis-NIR) spectroscopy, acknowledged for its efficiency, environmental compatibility and rapidity, merges as a promising alternative. However, the effectiveness of Vis-NIR measurement models are significantly compromised by soil particle size distribution (PSD), presenting a substantial challenge in improving the measurement accuracy and reliability. Here an innovative deep learning methodology that integrates PSD with Vis-NIR spectroscopy was proposed for the measurement of nitrogen content in soil samples. By leveraging the LUCAS dataset, different strategies for integrating PSD with Vis-NIR spectral data in deep learning models were explored, revealing that our proposed InSGraL framework, which incorporated mixed features of PSD and spectra as LSTM inputs achieves superior performance. Compared to models utilizing solely Vis-NIR data, InSGraL exhibits a 39.47 % reduction in RMSE and a 42.55 % decrease in MAE, and demonstrates robust performance across various land cover types, achieving an R² of 0.94 on grassland samples. Moreover, Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis revealed that incorporating PSD modifies the spectral input importance distribution, effectively mitigating spectral interference from particle size while highlighting critical wavelengths previously obscured. This study provides an innovative modeling strategy to mitigate the influence of PSD by integrating it within deep learning framework using Vis-NIR, contributing a deeper understanding of the relationship between PSD and Vis-NIR spectra for the measurement of nitrogen content and offering an effective means to attain soil nitrogen data.