Quantifying Soil Complexity Using Fisher Shannon Method on 3D X-ray Computed Tomography Scans
Domingos Aguiar,
Rômulo Simões Cezar Menezes,
Antonio Celso Dantas Antonino,
Tatijana Stosic,
Ana M. Tarquis,
Borko Stosic
Affiliations
Domingos Aguiar
Departamento de Estatística e Informática, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manoel de Medeiros s/n, Dois Irmãos, Recife 52171-900, PE, Brazil
Rômulo Simões Cezar Menezes
Departamento de Energia Nuclear, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Av. Prof. Moraes Rego 1235, Cidade Universitária, Recife 50670-901, PE, Brazil
Antonio Celso Dantas Antonino
Departamento de Energia Nuclear, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Av. Prof. Moraes Rego 1235, Cidade Universitária, Recife 50670-901, PE, Brazil
Tatijana Stosic
Departamento de Estatística e Informática, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manoel de Medeiros s/n, Dois Irmãos, Recife 52171-900, PE, Brazil
Ana M. Tarquis
Department of Applied Mathematics, ETSIAAB, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro, n. 2-4, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Borko Stosic
Departamento de Estatística e Informática, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manoel de Medeiros s/n, Dois Irmãos, Recife 52171-900, PE, Brazil
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.
