Guest Editorial: Near Infrared Spectroscopy for a Better Understanding of Soil

The 68th United Nations General Assembly declared 2015 as the International Year of the Soil (IYS 2015) because soil is profoundly important for life. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was nominated to implement the IYS 2015 to increase awareness and understanding of the importance of soil for food security, climate mitigation and essential ecosystem functions. Other specific objectives of the IYS 2015 were to educate the public about the importance of soil, support policies for the protection of the soil resource, promote investment to maintain healthy soil, strengthen sustainable soil management initiatives and advocate for a rapid enhancement of capacity to collect soil information for monitoring at all scales from the regional to national and global. Thus we thought it fitting to support the IYS 2015 activities and develop a special issue in JNIRS—Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy dedicated to the application of near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in soil science. NIR spectroscopy has a clear role to play in the provision of good quality soil information at different scales, as it can be used to rapidly and precisely characterise the chemical, physical and mineralogical composition of the soil at a small cost. This volume contains ten original contributions from around the world. It is evident in most of these papers that the mentioned advantages of NIR spectroscopy, as well as the little sample preparation needed and the simultaneous determination of many soil attributes, are the reasons for using NIR spectroscopy when seeking quantitative data on soil. NIR is particularly attractive for soil analyses because many measurements are needed to characterise the diverse composition and functions of soil, which can vary greatly over different scales.