Assessment of Spatial Variations and Estimating Soil Organic Carbon by Using Pedotransfer Functions and Feasibility Study of SOC by Remote Sensing in Arid and Semi Arid Area (A Case Study in Neyshaboor Area, Iran)

More than two third of the world lands are located in arid and semi arid area including Iran. Unfortunately there is lack of information and consequently poor scientific studies in these areas because of the difficulties which we face for collecting data and doing field studies in such a big areas under hard situations. However, in the recent decades there has been a great progress in using remote sensing technology in agriculture activities especially for land and farm management tasks. This technique could help to explore more specifications of these areas and their impacts on environment. This study was directed to deal with the possibility of using LandSat ETM+ images for developing some models to monitor soil organic materials and comparing with other soil properties in a typical arid and semi arid area such as Neyshaboor in North East of Iran. The relations between soil properties and spectrum values derived from the images were extracted and analyzed. The results shows that intensity of reflection related to soil organic carbon is very low which is in order of two percent. Consequently the data that was collected from field study was assessed separately and a model was developed. Using this model it is possible to assess the soil organic materials (less than two percent) for soils in the study area.