Quantifying Soil Complexity Using Fisher Shannon Method on 3D X-ray Computed Tomography Scans

The conversion of native forest into agricultural land, which is common in many parts of the world, poses important questions regarding soil degradation, demanding further efforts to better understand the effect of land use change on soil functions. With the advent of 3D computed tomography techniques and computing power, new methods are becoming available to address this question. In this direction, in the current work we implement a modification of the Fisher-Shannon method, borrowed from information theory, to quantify the complexity of twelve 3D CT soil samples from a sugarcane plantation and twelve samples from a nearby native Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil. The distinction found between the samples from the sugar plantation and the Atlantic forest site is quite pronounced. The results at the level of 91.7% accuracy were obtained considering the complexity in the Fisher-Shannon plane. Atlantic forest samples are found to be generally more complex than those from the sugar plantation.

Automated summary

This study used an improved Fisher-Shannon method to analyze soil samples from a sugarcane plantation and a nearby Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil. The results showed that the soil samples from the Atlantic forest were generally more complex than those from the sugarcane plantation.