Publications Repository - Gdańsk University of Technology

Soil is one of the most important farming resources. Appropriate managing of its quality promotes productive and sustainable agriculture. The valuable farm practice in soil quality managing is based on regular soil analysis with the aim to determine the exact amount of nutrients or other chemical, physical and biological soil properties. Soil analysis usually requires samples collection at desired sampling depth following by samples delivering to the chemical laboratories. However, laboratory analyses are resource-intensive and costly, requires a lot of time, effort, and equipment. A low-cost, fast and effective alternative for soil quality control is an application of smartphones to perform chemical analyses directly in the field or on the farm. In this paper, an overview of recent developments on smartphone-based methodologies for agricultural purposes and portable evaluation of soil quality and its properties is presented. The discussion focuses on recent applications of smartphone-based devices for the determination of basic soil parameters, content of organic matter, mineral fertilizers as well as organic or inorganic pollutants. Obvious advantages of using smartphones, such as convenience and simplicity of use, and main shortcomings such as relatively poor precision of the results obtained are also discussed. The general trend shows the huge interest of the researchers to move the technology into the field with the aim to provide cost effective and rapid soil analysis. This paper can broaden the understanding of using smartphones for chemical analysis of soil samples, as it is a relatively new area and is expected to be develop rapidly.

Authors

• dr hab. inż. Marek Tobiszewski link open in new tab ,
• dr Khrystyna Vakh link open in new tab