Interest in the use of visible-near infrared reflectance spectroscopy for the remote determination of mineralogical composition in soils and planetary surfaces has been demonstrated since the 1970s with the development of databases in the laboratory of minerals spectra by Hunt and Salisbury. The attraction for soil spectroscopy is that measurements are rapid and estimates of soil properties are inexpensive compared to conventional soil analyses. Nowadays the research on quantitative soil spectroscopy for the prediction of soil properties, prompted by developments in multivariate statistics and chemometrics, is continuing to grow. In the past decade the new availability of high signal-to-noise ratio hyperspectral airborne sensors opened important new possibilities for the quantitative chemical and physical analyses of Earth soil surface composition. This has a strong impact in many soil science fields, like for the evaluation and monitoring of soil quality and quantity, soil function (e.g., water storage, carbon storage), soil fertility and soil threats (e.g., acidification, erosion). A demand for global digital soil mapping was also prioritized.

We invite authors to contribute original research and review articles. The main focus of this special issue will be on the new and existing methods used from both proximal and remote sensing data for the quantitative analyses of reflectance and imaging spectroscopy of mineralogical surfaces. This special issue will serve as an international forum for researchers describing the state of the art in the direct, multivariate, and inverse modeling of soil spectra for the quantitative description of soils and their properties. It will resume the most recent developments and ideas in the field, both in the laboratory and in the field and at different spatial scales, with a particular emphasis on the methodological and application results within the last five years. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Soil spectroscopy: historical perspective
• Physical modeling of soil spectra
• Multivariate statistics
• New methods and software
• Soil science results by means of state-of-the-art hyperspectral imagery
• Comparison with other spectroscopic techniques: Thermal Infrared (TIR)
• Spectroscopic libraries
• Commercial applications of soil spectroscopy
• Future strategies
• Practical usage of soil spectroscopy

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