Study on Plant Nutrition Indicator Using Leaf Spectral Transmittance for Nitrogen Detection

The low fertilizer utilization at growing season and environment pollution coursed by unreasonable fertilization are becoming global outstanding problems in agricultural production. Scientific and reasonable fertilization based on rapid and nondestructive plant nutrient detection will be a valuable solution for solving above problems. In this study, spectral transmittance in wavelength ranged from 300 to 1100 nm, chlorophyll content and nitrogen content of rice and cucumber leaves treated with culture solution in five different nitrogen levels were measured. According to the correlation analysis between them, 560, 650, and 720 nm as feature wavelengths and 940 nm as reference wavelength were determined for nitrogen detection. Correlation analysis between 21 spectral feature parameters composed by the transmittance at above wavelength, the leaf chlorophyll content and nitrogen content, and combined with their regression examination indicated that spectral feature parameters of (T940 T560) / (T940 + T560), log (T940/T560) and log (T940/T650) are useful to conduct plant nutrient diagnosis with less than 8% relative error in rice and cucumber leaves. Therefore, the above spectral feature parameters as plant nitrogen indicators can be used to estimate the chlorophyll content and nitrogen content, furthermore support for non-destructive plant nutrient detection and fertilizer recommendation based on testing soil.