Digital imaging based spectrophotometric techniques for soil pathogen monitoring and detection

Soil characteristics in agriculture represent one of the primary key-factors affecting soil productivity and quality of the produced products. Soil characterization are conventionally performed adopting integrated physical-chemical analyses based on soil portion (samples) directly collected in situ. Such an approach is obviously time consuming. In this work is examined the possibility offered by digital imagine, based spectrophotometric techniques in order to perform fast and reliable tests able to identify and quantify specific soil characteristics of primary importance in horticulture. The proposed approach is very simple to apply and for its flexibility can be profitably utilized also for other applications (i.e. environmental monitoring) where soil reclamation plays a pre-eminent role.